Canada may have launched itself into the digital stratosphere in admirable fashion, impressively gaining ground as a legit scene of online shopping, but it’s not taken all its players along for the ride. And, says a just-released report by Yellow Pages Canada, the laggard Main St. retailers are not likely to ever catch up.
“Cities as Warehouses, The Survival of Main Street in a Digital World” reports that, while big retailers “are well-oiled SEO and SEM machines with the resources to devote to upkeeping and adjusting campaigns as technology and digital marketing evolve,” their mom-and-pop counterparts haven’t the resources to play in their echelons.
Retailers have long heard the refrain that they should get on line, but this new research reveals that the little guy in the corner shop simply might not have the wherewithal to do so.
Take Amazon Fulfillment, for one, and the powers it has to facilitate e-commerce onboarding. As helpful a solution as this is for large manufacturers, it’s neither appropriate nor affordable for small retailers.
Among the report’s results, find:
- 89% of Canadians buy online.
- 85% of buyers do preliminary research online.
- There are 146,000 retail locations in Canada.
- Over the nest two years, 48% of Canadians plan to increase their online shopping.
- 18% of retailers still do not have a website and 30% of them don’t feel the need.
- 53% of retailers don’t consider online retail their competition.
- 36% of retailers plan to increase their online investment by 2018.
The report makes a couple of suggestions for the little retailers to improve their scene, including urging neighbourhood competitors to band together—using geo-localization technology—into a more powerful united force, and launching a local digital marketplace.
