Canadians plan to do more holiday shopping online this year: poll

TORONTO – Canadian consumers have been shopping online more frequently this year and plan to hit the web for more of their gift buying this December, suggests a recent survey.

According to an online poll of 1,000 Canadians conducted by Solutions Research Group in August, two thirds of the respondents said they had made an online purchase in the past month, which was up about 10 per cent compared to the results of a similar survey last year.

Almost half of the Canadians who had shopped online in the past month were in the 30 to 49 age range and 40 per cent were from Ontario.

When asked what their top online shopping destinations were, Amazon was the most popular response, followed by eBay, Walmart, Indigo, Best Buy, Sears, Old Navy, Future Shop, Costco and Beyond the Rack.

About 33 per cent of the Canadians polled said they wouldn’t do any online shopping this holiday season, which was down five percentage points compared to last year.

Around 25 per cent said they would do most of their shopping in retail stores, 29 per cent said it would be a 50-50 split between in-store and online shopping, and 11 per cent said most of their gift purchases would be with e-tailers.

The polling industry’s professional body, the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association, says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error as they are not a random sample and therefore are not necessarily representative of the whole population.