Canadian Retailers Still Need To Step Up Their E-Commerce Game

For some strange reason, Canadian retailers still haven’t caught up with the rest of the world when it comes to selling products online. It should come as a surprise to no one that today’s consumers love browsing, comparing prices and making purchases on the internet. Online shopping has made the buying experience so much easier for shoppers. And this is especially true during the holiday season.

Most people aren’t interested in looking for hard-to-find parking spaces, navigating through crowded malls and standing in long line ups to pay for their purchases. They much prefer the comfort of their own homes and the ability to have the products they buy get delivered to their doorsteps. So, it begs the question: why aren’t more Canadian merchants investing in e-commerce?

David Bell of CBC News is asking the same question. Earlier this month, he reported that “a veteran retail analyst says growth in online shopping is exploding around the world, but Canadian retailers will have to up their game to cash in.” Popular online retailers like Amazon have been breaking sales records, as of late, proving that Canadian shoppers are just as wild about the online shopping trend as the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, most Canadian retailers continue to rely on their brick-and-mortar store locations to sell their products to the public. Doug Stephens is a retail analyst. In Bell’s report, Stephens reveals that the growth rates of online shopping are far outweighing the growth rates of traditional shopping. “The retail sector, globally, usually grows at a rate of about four to six per cent a year,” he informs, “Online shopping is growing at more than 20 per cent a year.”

Stephens admits that online shopping “still represents a relatively small proportion of retail but it\’s growing at a rate that suggests it is going to be a larger and larger per cent of retail.” Certain sales figures, however, communicate that the rate at which products are sold online are so astronomical, they can’t even be compared to the rate of sales at physical store locations. He uses China-based online retailer, Alibaba.com as an example.

During a single day promotion last month, the company sold an unbelievable $20 billion (with a “b”) in merchandise. “To give you a sense of how that day went down, in the first hour of that sales day, $5 billion worth of merchandise was transacted,” describes Stephens, “That runs at a rate of about $83 million a minute which is about what two Home Depots sell in a fiscal year, every minute of the first hour of that sale.”

Bell goes on to explain that such online sales figures are becoming the norm in North America as all of the sales figures for this year’s big shopping days – Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday – have been shattered. “This is a phenomenon,” he emphatically states, “It has gone from incremental to exponential now.”

Canadian POS Corporation agrees that a lot more Canadian retailers need to get in on the only-bound-to-grow phenomenon of e-commerce. We offer a secure e-commerce solution that enables you to easily and securely accept and process all credit cards – Visa, MasterCard, Discover Network, American Express – from your website.

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