Although Canada lags behind the United States in Internet use in general and in e-commerce in particular, about twice as many Canadians bank online as do their neighbors to the south, according to Steven Bartkiw, the chief executive officer of AOL Canada Inc.
Bartkiw discussed the state of Canadian e-commerce in a pre-conference keynote speech yesterday at the Canadian Marketing Association’s National Convention and Trade Show in Toronto. The conference opened last night and will run through Thursday.
In addition to the AOL Canada users, he said that over half the households in both Canada and the United States owned computers, making penetration comparable. However, only 20% of Canadian computer owners paid for online services compared with 35% of Americans.
Bartkiw added that 40% of those online services buyers also bought products online. However, because so few Canadian companies developed e-commerce sites, most of those consumers shopped “south of the border.”
“They are hesitant to take the risk to invest online,” he explained. Some of this hesitancy may be because there were no national Canadian online service providers until five years ago, more than 10 years after the United States had such Internet service providers.
Mixing statistics from AOL’s own research with numbers from a recent article in “The Globe and Mail,” Bartkiw filled out the profile of the Canadian Internet user. Some 23% of those users paid bills online.
Bartkiw’s presentation focused on how AOL has been expanding in Canada over the past few years. Management of AOL Canada is local, and the Royal Bank of Canada owns 20% of the ISP. In addition to the Royal Bank, AOL Canada has more than 80 partners providing local content and commerce to its more than 3 million members.
Nevertheless, AOL is only the No. 2 ISP in Canada, behind Microsoft. That’s true even though it had 30% growth thanks to the partnership with the Royal Bank and an aggressive branding and membership television campaign that ran during the 1999 holiday season.
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