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Take Black Friday, a relatively new shopping event in Canada that saw a glut of consumers flood this country’s shopping malls this year for pre-holiday deals. By 1 p.m. eastern on Nov. 25, transactions per second at Canadian bricks-and-mortar stores had surpassed the number of store transactions for Black Friday in 2015, according to payments processor Moneris.

“Why would someone put themselves in that chaos?” Guzzi said. “Why not just do it online? It’s become a cultural thing. That’s part of the experience — it’s a war story to tell at the cocktail party three weeks later.”

As defined by Statistics Canada, ecommerce covers items that are delivered to a consumers’ home and those that are purchased online and picked up by customers at a store, the so-called “click and collect” model demonstrated by Canadian Tire and select Loblaw stores.

While just 0.5 per cent of the sales for Canadian bricks and mortar retailers come from e-commerce, traditional retailers aiming to stay at the forefront of industry trends have been investing heavily in the model.

Almost a third of HBC’s planned capital expenditures for 2016 of between $700 million and $750 million are going towards technology investments, and the department store retailer recently made $60 million in upgrades to its Toronto distribution centre.

The StatsCan data also reflects the entire pool of bricks-and-mortar retailers in Canada, Strapagiel noted, including the multiple smaller retailers that do not sell their wares online.

Some of them achieve a much bigger segment of online sales than the overall sector. At Vancouver-based sportswear retailer Lululemon Athletica, for example, digital sales accounted for about 17 per cent of the retailer’s overall sales of $514.5 million in the second quarter.

Market research firm eMarketer predicts Canadian retail sales will grow 1.7 per cent this year to $522.6 billion, with a 15 per-cent increase in e-commerce sales.



Financial Post

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