Online shopping has increased due to the pandemic and it’s impacting businesses differently.
Daniel Doiron, a business professor at the University of New Brunswick, said the pandemic wasn’t in the plan for businesses, and they’re trying to survive.
“I think people are doing more online shopping because they were forced to when they didn’t have any brick and mortar stores to go to and that’s probably grown their interest in online shopping,” he said.
Doiron said businesses are struggling although in some cases bigger businesses are better equipped.
“So the question really is about the businesses. With the growing interest in online shopping how does a small business that’s local in nature take advantage of that growing sentiment towards online shopping,” he said.
Doiron said when smaller businesses reopen, they may have difficulties with costs going up and uncertainties about sales.
“I think we’re starting to see a shift in attitude towards online as part of your business more form the businesses’ perspective than the consumers’ perspective,” he said.
Carol Holmes, is the executive director with Excellence New Brunswick, a non-profit association which was created to promote New Brunswick-made products.
One of the ways they’ve done this is by creating a website to make it easier to find locally made products.
She said the trend of online shopping started way back and what she’s seen is smaller producers in the province realized right away they needed to be online.
“I think that people are busy, we have busy lives and we look for what’s the most convenient way to buy what we need. Large brick and mortar shops of course have always done well and are still doing well today and it’s easy and convenient to go there and pick up what you need, but the issue is there isn’t a lot of local products in those large stores,” she said,
Holmes said it’s an investment a lot of hard work for local businesses to get into those big stores and it isn’t always do-able.
“To have a street-facing brick and mortar kind of facility isn’t doable for everyone as well. It’s very expensive to get into, having a physical location to sell your products,” she said.
Holmes said selling online makes it more accessible for smaller producers to find and sell to clients.
“Online shopping has really revolutionized traditional retail in the past few years. It’s really impacting brick and mortar sales,” she said.
Meanwhile, Dan Doiron thinks companies will start pursuing a mix of physical storefronts and online commerce to drive up sales otherwise the risk of failure is increased.
“Maybe the moral of the story is in many cases you’d better figure that out.”
