All good things must come to an end. And that includes Ontplates.com as a functioning small business. But we’re not shutting our doors imminently, and we’re certainly not going to leave our loyal customers out in the cold.
Ontplates.com is a sole proprietorship, which means everything is the responsibility of one person in his spare time. As life happens, things change. Spare time isn’t as easy to find. New interests unfold. Families have new commitments. For a variety of reasons—some personal and some economical—Ontplates.com will ramp down in 2024, and will cease business operations in mid-2025.
Product Availability
To prepare for this change, we will focus our restoration and sale operations on works-in-progress. We hope to have no stalled items in our work queue by December 2024. Usually, when we shut down for the winter (because of no heat in the home garage), everything is paused: We have plates that have been blasted and are waiting for body repair. We have repaired plates that are waiting for primer. We have primed plates waiting for top coats. And we have top-coated plates waiting for number detailing. Our goal for December 2024 is to have no remaining restoration work. This means that restored plates of certain years will eventually go out of stock, not to return.
Timeline for Closure
We will continue until December 31, 2024, to sell pairs of plates that are guaranteed for Year of Manufacture registration. After that date, guaranteed sales will cease. Ontplates.com will continue to exist as a business until June 30, 2025. This is for two reasons:
- To be available for customer support during their 6-month guarantee period, and;
- To liquidate our remaining stock on an unguaranteed, as-is basis.
After June 30, 2025, our guarantee obligations will have been fulfilled, and we can discontinue business operations without compromising the previous guarantees that we have made.
The Future
The business itself is not for sale. The Ontplates.com brand will not be sold, and will continue to be used for hobby promotion purposes after formal closure of the business, which won’t happen until the end of June 2025. This is good news, because it means that you’ll still be able to find Jon and pick his brain if you have questions about what you can and cannot do with Ontario’s YOM program.
Ontplates.com has built a well-earned reputation of being an honest, straight-shooting business that refuses to apply pressure to make a sale. There is an element of trust that clients must forge with us, as with any small online business. Some clients ask to contact us by phone to make sure that we’re legit before making a purchase. We’ve been around for 20 years, and as of this moment, we’ve sold 1719 registrable sets of plates (only 9 customers have ever had to take us up on our guarantee). We eschew the notion of “here today, gone tomorrow.” We will not simply vanish into the night without warning. If we have to wrap up, we’re going to do right by our customers… as we always have.
Updated Terms and Conditions
We have updated our Terms and Conditions page to outline exactly when we will stop offering guaranteed plates for sale, and how we will honour existing guarantees during our end-business liquidation.