Shopping Online ~ Canada vs. the U.S

September 6th, 2007 by Carolyn Gardner

Proportionately, Canada has more people online than the US. And in terms of broadband penetration/general affordability, we’re right up there rivaling other developed countries on this great planet of ours. See below…

Internet Usage Chart Yet turn the table to e-commerce and Canada lags the US.

According to a new e-commerce report from eMarketer (yours for the low, low price of $695), Canada’s online potential is very much untapped…

“Canada’s e-commerce has languished in the absence of retailers and online offerings that genuinely address Canadian tastes and requirements. Moreover, the country’s mobile networks and operators are not as well prepared as they should be to supply reliable data services at competitive prices.” eMarketer goes on to say: “These social, technical and commercial obstacles threaten to hold Canada back when the country should be setting online standards for North America and the world.”

Canadian tastes and requirements? What the heck does that mean? I don’t think our tastes our that different than our friends south of the border. And as for requirements, what can be so special here? Like anyone, we Canadians just want to have online choices that can be purchased securely, returned easily, shipped nicely etc.

Ahhh shipping. Yes, this brings me to what I believe to be the major challenge for e-commerce and Canadians. Specifically the hefty costs or the genuine lack of shipping available to Canada.

As Canadians, we tire of teasing ourselves with online shopping only to be stopped at the checkout by order forms that only accept “state” and not ”province” = clue #1 that they won’t ship to Canada. Or perhaps even more frustrating, order forms that get you through the complete process but then at the end on a new screen, as if it is nothing, a shipping charge that’s double the cost of the deal in your cart get casually introduced! Argh. Talk about ruining the experience.

But let me get back to the cross-border shipping thing. Why don’t more US retailers take advantage of Canadians online dominance? Well some do. And the really smart ones are using technology like Sitebrand’s Retail Marketing Suite since it can recognize Canadian visitors (or visitors from anywhere for that matter) and fire appropriate content to that visitor - i.e. We ship to Canada! Talk about giving us the confidence we need to build our e-commerce spends to something more inline with our potential!

Posted in Carolyn Gardner, Personalization, eCommerce |

One Response

Khalid Hajsaleh Says:

September 10th, 2007 at 9:25 am

Kelly,

You bring up an excellent question of why don’t many US retailers take advantage of the ever growing the Canadian market. As strange as it sounds, many of the large ecommerce sites (bestbuy, motorola, ssi, etc) all use the same custom software package. That package for one reason or another comes with US shipping as a standard. I think the developer never thought of handling shipping to other countries. You think somethign like that will be easy to fix but it escapes many ecomerce sites.