E-commerce in Canada: What are we waiting for?

Last week Industry Canada issued a report on the state of e-commerce in Canada. It's not a pretty picture. Canada is lagging way behind the U.S., the U.K. and elsewhere when it comes to selling online.

This is not only unfortunate for our economy, but frustrating for Canadians who want to buy from Canadian merchants. And most do want to. Not necessarily out of patriotism, but to avoid the hassles of getting merchandise across the border.

Canadian customers are eager to buy

Canadians are buying online. By 2015, online spending in Canada is expected to nearly double, reaching CAD $30.9 billion, according to eMarketer. Yet Google estimates that as many as 1.2 million Canadian businesses do not even have a website! 

By 2010 over half of Canadian Internet users were already placing orders online, according to Statistics Canada, and the percentage doing so continues to increase. Despite the evident desire to buy from Canadian companies, 60% of respondents said that at least some of their online orders were with merchants and service providers in the United States, and a further 18% ordered from companies located in other countries. What a wasted opportunity for Canada!

So why aren't more Canadian companies selling online?  

The answers, I believe, vary by size of company. 

• The big retailers are still struggling to figure out how to do e-retail right. Witness, for example, HBC, which never really made a commitment to e-commerce, despite the fact that with its Canada-wide retail network, shipping and in-store pickup would be a no-brainer.
• Mid-sized companies suffer from a lack of conviction that e-commerce could work for them. They can't compete with prices of the big boys, so how can they compete? (I'll answer that question in a subsequent post. It can be done.) At the same time, they are big enough that to sell online they would need to invest fairly heavily in e-commerce related software and services to provide the range of products and level of service that their customers would expect. 
• Small companies are overwhelmed by time pressures, confusion, and cash flow crises. It is not obvious who they can turn to for help with their web presence. Many got started with the kid next door who put up a little site for them while he was in high school. These sites typically look awful and are totally ineffective for boosting sales. The owners (a) don't have the money to redo the site, (b) don't have the know-how, (c) don't have the time, and (d) because the first site was so useless, they don't have the belief that a serious online presence could be profitable. 

Are a greater proportion of US companies online?  

 I suspect that among large retailers, they are. The US has a much more competitive retail landscape than we have in Canada. E-retail sales have been growing much faster than store sales, so they've seen clear benefit to getting in the game. 

What I'm wondering about is small and mid-sized businesses? In absolute numbers, of course more of them are online. But as a % of businesses in their size? I don't know. I haven't been able to find any data on that. 

Are we nearly there yet? 

Regardless, I believe things are soon going to turn around in Canada. The country has just held its second e-tail conference. Shop.ca is launching, with a promise of simplifying delivery to Canadians. And increasingly people seem to be realizing that we Canadians have to hop onto the e-commerce wagon or risk being left in the dust.

Fake Reviews Killing a Great Idea

I had a conversation last night with the founder of one of North America's leading Yellow Pages ad agencies. We discussed how much longer the print versions of Yellow Pages will continue to exist, and why (or why not. Personally, I think they will not last much longer.)

I argued that the Web provides many advantages over a Yellow Pages listing: you can provide much more information about what your company does, you get the instant map feature to know how easy they are to get to physically, and people can see ratings and reviews to help them select the most suitable provider.

I know that fake reviews are becoming a problem, but the problem is even more severe than I'd realized.

Originally fake reviews weren't too big a problem, as not enough people would spend weeks on end manually submitting fake reviews to overwhelm the true reviews.

In Stage 2 of the review site evolution, people started hiring cheap labour to populate the reviews for their company. Even now, if you look on freelance service websites such as Fiverr or ODesk, they are filled with offers and requests for people to post fake reviews.

Now we are at Stage 3, where fake reviews are created automatically. I just looked at a video for one such company (don't want to give them extra publicity by mentioning the name). With $47 and the click of a few buttons you can automatically submit hundreds of fake, but real-sounding, reviews under different names. They showed how you could instantly create a review site that scrapes listings from the Yellow Pages, then populates the listings with fake reviews so your site looks legit. You can even set it so that the reviews are submitted in small batches, so it is less likely to be caught by services looking for fraudulent submissions. The result is that legit business can be destroyed by being falsely (and randomly) populated with a few negative reviews.

So how can we deal with this problem? An expensive way would be to make submitters provide a phone number and then doing random telephone audits. Maybe ultimately, as people become more aware of the problem, quality review sites will provide that service. But it is labour intensive.

Technological solutions do not yet seem to be the answer. They slip into an inevitable "arms race" -- one side finds a way to spot fake reviews, so the software builders find new ways to get around the spotters.

Any other ideas for how to deal with it?

Exciting news for e-marketers!

Google Hangouts On Air has gone live! If I'm understanding it correctly (haven't fully tested it yet), this has the potential to replace boring teleseminars with free live video events.

Here's how it works:

1. You sign up for Google+ if you haven't already.
2. You click to start a Hangout, and set it to On Air
3. Up to nine people can participate in the video broadcast (so you could be interviewing others, for example), but at the same time an unlimited number can be watching the broadcast live!
4. Once the broadcast is over, they automatically upload it to your YouTube channel for others to watch.

This has amazing potential for internet marketers of all sorts. I think this could be what really makes Google+ take off!

Some Surprising Pinterest Success Stories

A little while ago I wrote about the value of Pinterest for e-marketers.

Who'd have thought that a company as un-visual as GE could put together great Pinterest boards. A recent article, by Becky Celestine, highlights several companies that are using Pinterest effectively in the B2C market ( http://www.onlinemba.com/blog/10-surprising-brands-killing-it-on-pinterest/ ).

The keys seem to be:

1. Find a way to represent your brand/services/products visually.
2. Use humor if you possibly can.

How NOT to encourage comments

In my post of a few minutes ago, I commended Alexis Madrigal for his excellent article suggesting that we've had enough of new social networks. How ironic that the article appeared on precisely such a site (storeboard.com), and one that isn't even doing it well.

I wanted to just post a little reply telling him how much I appreciated his article. But...

• Mistake #1: The site tells you that you have to log in or join to post a comment. I should not have to do that. But, because I believe in praising good articles when I see them, I figured, OK, I'll sign up. It is presumably free. 
• Mistake #2: I hate those captcha's where you have to guess what some distorted letters are to prove you are not a bot. So at first I was delighted to see that these folks took a different approach. They present you with a grid of nine pictures, and you have to click on the one that matches an easy-to-read word they give you (e.g. Click on the cat). But it makes the reader do four of them! Why? Surely one is enough to prove that I'm a real person? 
• Mistake #3: Once I got through the pictures, it asked me what category of membership I wanted. Excuse me? I don't even know what the site is all about, and I don't want to take the time to find out. I just wanted to post a "Well done, Alexis!" comment. Are there fees for the different categories? What are the benefits of each? One of the options was "community member" so I clicked that, thinking at last I can finally post my comment. Wrong!
• Mistake #4: Then I get another full page of questions!!! What are they thinking?? By this point, I bailed and came to write this post. 

Please folks, if you want people to comment on your blog, DON'T take this approach!