More Than Three Quarters of Canadians Shopped Online Last Year. Is This the End of Retail Shops?

Shopping malls may soon become an eyesore of the past. 

According to data from Canada Post, more than three quarters of Canadian households (76 per cent) shopped online last year. While occasionally buying on the internet is nothing new, almost a quarter of online shoppers do so frequently – four to 10 times per year.

We probably all know someone who achieves this threshold daily.

Future Shop, of course, is the biggest victim of this shift in consumer behaviour. Best Buy closed all of its Future Shop locations across the country last year, and so far has come up with a service that has only a marginal advantage over Amazon to stay competitive with the internet. 
Toys and games proved to be especially popular items to buy online, with shipments among this segment of products rising by 37 per cent compared to last year. We assume this is because three-year-olds have iPads now, but no further insight was available. 

A major factor for the shift has to do with how products are being shipped. Brick and mortar retailers simply can’t compete with consumers’ thirst for having their wants and needs delivered almost instantly and, more importantly, cheaply. 

Don’t worry retailers, the newspaper industry knows how you feel. 

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