Canadians are letting their fingers do the walking over keyboards to shop these days. That’s what a $14 billion dollar increase in online sales over last year, according to Statistics Canada, suggests.
Similar to the previous year, most of the sales were from wholesale trade, manufacturing and retail industries. It was the service sector that showed growth, increasing from 11 per cent last year, to 13 per cent of everything sold via the internet.
Statistics Canada’s classification of large companies, those with 100 or more employees, were behind most of the sales growth. They’re also responsible for most of the selling online, collecting nearly $87 C billion for their efforts last year.
Websites are a major factor
While just under half of all Canadian companies have some web presence, almost all big companies (91 per cent) have fully developed web sites. And of these, one in five have web versions for mobile users, as the digital revolution continues.
The companies equipped to sell online reaped almost a quarter of their entire sales in cyberspace last year.
And companies are buying this way too. According to Statistics Canada, 47 per cent of all companies bought goods or services online in 2013.
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