As retailers worldwide gear up to re-open following the first wave of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, a Toronto-based company is offering a free online service to improve safety for customers and employees.

"We realized that they felt overwhelmed," OneLocal Director of Operations Maggie McIntyre told CityNews. "They have this huge task of distilling all of the guidelines that they were meant to follow and then, even more so, informing their customers of all these positive changes that they were making."

OneLocal created COVIDsafe, which allows businesses to create a profile, based on their industry, which will include a checklist of precautions the business is implementing. Customers can check the business profile to be reassured the business is operating responsibly amid the ongoing pandemic.

COVIDsafe's services follow guidelines from Infection Prevention and Control Canada, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in addition to Australian health services, the company's website says. With those guidelines, COVIDsafe equips" businesses and customers with all that is needed to transact safely following the aftershocks of COVID‑19," the website says.

COVIDsafe has spent considerable time "collaborating with industry associations, advisory groups and our local teams to develop a comprehensive set of standard operating procedures (SOP) for various types of industries and make them accessible for everyone," the company said.

A OneLocal survey found that four out of five consumers said that they won't ever frequent a business unless it is following COVID-19 safety standards, McIntyre told CityNews.

"So we knew that if customers didn't trust that small businesses were taking the proper precautions when it came to their safety, they'd consider going elsewhere or maybe even going online," she said.

A company's COVIDsafe profile can reassure customers that it's reasonably safe to patronize a business, McIntyre said.

"They can show their customers exactly what precautions they're taking," she said.