This text is taken from Courrier de l’économie. Click here to subscribe.
Slowly and steadily growing for years, e-commerce has surged with the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada. Following in particular the fear that consumers had of the virus and the level of restriction of public health rules, online retail sales almost doubled from February to May 2020, before falling back a little during the summer and returning to the rise at the end of that year, Statistics Canada reported last week.
In January 2021, the volume of e-commerce was thus twice as high as 12 months earlier. It will fall again thereafter, as life somehow resumes its normal course, but was still two-thirds higher this summer than before COVID.
In-store sales, for their part, fell by 40% in the first months of the pandemic before returning, more or less, to their initial trend.
The maintenance of a high level of online sales therefore seems to indicate “a structural change in consumer preferences and retailer business models”, observes Statistics Canada. Some continue to see it as “an interesting way to buy”, while others “have increased their online presence and continued to invest in online sales and e-commerce capabilities”.
Be careful, everything is relative
However, all these trends remain relative. Indeed, although having increased sharply with the pandemic, online sales have only fallen from 3.9% of all retail trade in Canada in 2019, to 6.2% last year. , which still leaves almost 94% of the total to in-store trade.
Already higher than in other sectors, the weight of e-commerce in total sales has increased further for furniture and home accessories (from 6% to 13%), for sporting goods, music and books (from 11% to 19%), for clothing (also from 11% to 19%) and especially for electronic and household appliances (from 26% to 32%).
On the other hand, online sales in other sectors started from much further than in-store trade and remain so today. This is the case, for example, for construction material and gardening supply merchants (from 1.3% to 4.1%) or even food stores (from 0.7% to 1.8 %). Others stalled, such as health and personal care products (from 5% to 5.5%).