Online Shopping Expected To Be Huge This Holiday Season

We’re getting pretty close to the holiday shopping season. And even though many Canadians have already begun their holiday shopping, the unofficial beginning of the season is the day after Halloween. That’s the day that, pretty much, every mall and storefront across Canada is decorated with the white, green and red colours that are associated with the holiday season. And, of course, it’s a time when the malls become a lot more crowded.

Many Canadians, however, dread the holiday shopping season. And it’s not because they don’t wish to do their own shopping. As much as they may enjoy picking up gifts for their loved ones, they don’t enjoy having to traverse through packed shopping centres in order to get to the stores where those gifts are located. Instead, they turn to online shopping, which grows exponentially each and every year.

Some Canadians, in fact, exclusively shop online. That way, they are able to avoid long line ups at checkouts, long wait times to find parking spaces and overcrowded malls that get hot and stuffy. Online shopping offers the benefit of being able to make purchases in the comfort of your own home. By having products shipped directly to their homes, customers alleviate a great deal of stress.

It’s not lost on online retailers that online shopping continues to gain popularity. E-commerce juggernaut, Amazon is gearing up for what may be its busiest online shopping season ever. As reported by Subrat Patnaik and Abhijith Ganapavaram of Reuters, courtesy of BNN.ca, Amazon is hiring more than 2,000 seasonal workers in Canada and 120,000 seasonal workers in the United States for the holiday season.

Highlighting the fact the e-commerce continues to be on the rise is the fact that the U.S. hiring plans mark a 20 percent increase from last year. Interestingly, U.S. retailers such as Macy\’s Inc, Target Corp and Kohl\’s Corp plan on hiring fewer temporary workers for their stores, which would maintain relatively normal levels of employment this holiday season. This indicates less of a need for in-store help than the need for extra hands on deck for product shipment.

In Canada, reports Patnaik and Ganapavaram, Amazon will be hiring hundreds of ongoing full-time roles for positions in their Toronto and Vancouver facilities. Obviously, the need for additional help in shipping products that have been purchased online has grown on both sides of the border. They note that online retailers have been putting a bit of dent in sales made at physical store locations.

“The U.S. National Retail Federation earlier this month forecast a 3.6 per cent rise in holiday sales this year, with online sales expected to climb 7 per cent to 10 per cent,” the duo writes, “Brick-and-mortar retailers\’ biggest challenge in recent years has been tackling the growth of online retailers, especially Amazon, which offer the same products at lower prices and have made shopping more convenient.”

At Canadian POS Corporation, we strongly believe that all Canadian retailers should offer their customers the option of purchasing their products online. Our incredible e-commerce solution can certainly help with that. For more information, please don’t hesitate to call Canadian POS Corporation at 1-877-748-2884 or email us at info@localhost. Let’s make this holiday shopping season your most successful one yet!