For most
of last year, cyberflowers.com followed a pattern that is only too
familiar to Canadian online merchants. Until last month, almost all
the traffic on www.cyberflowers.com came from outside the country.
The service, which delivers flowers around the world, was a hit in
the United States, where many people have become comfortable with
shopping on the Net, but made almost no impression on more cautious
Canadian shoppers.
Then, last month, she saw a dramatic change.
Canadian traffic on her web site suddenly soared. Her business more
than doubled in volume, and she found that about half her customers
were from Canada.
It was obvious to her what made the difference.
She had enrolled in two programs designed to foster online shopping
in Canada, and they were clearly working better than she could have
imagined.
"It was far beyond our expectations, an enormous boost
to our Canadian business," she says.
The programs, offered by Royal Bank of Canada,
involve a directory of Canadian retailers on the Web and an electronic wallet that makes
it easier for consumers to register with on-line merchants. They are typical of some of the
new ways in which financial institutions and other service providers are trying to jump-start
Internet shopping in Canada.
These programs address some of the key problems identified
in several recent on-line retailing surveys, such as the failure of most would-be purchasers
to complete their transactions on-line and the tendency of Canadian consumers to spend most
of their money in the United States because they can't find Canadian sites.
"When Canadian
merchants built a Web site and put everything in place, they found the traffic was not there,
yet for every $10 Canadian consumers spent online, $6 was being spent in the U.S.," says John
Pagliaro, Royal Bank's senior manager of sales for core markets.
A study conducted by the
Angus Reid Group for management consulting firm Deloitte & Touche late last year found that
about 90 per cent of Canadian on-line shoppers consciously look for Canadian sites first,
but most end up buying from U.S. sites. Ms. Gonsalves says her experience confirms such findings.
"Canadian shoppers want to use Canadian currency, but people are just not aware of all the
Canadian sites available," she says.
It is really important for a small business, such
as Cyberflowers.com - which now has about 2,500 Web visitors a say - to take advantage of
new technologies and services that can help build traffic to Web sites, Ms. Gonsalves says.
These services can help level the playing field, letting small business compete
successfully with larger retailers, she adds. "And I believe there is a window of opportunity
for small business to get into e-commerce, before the big companies realize what they're missing."