RE: Canadians Continue to Buy More Online

I was reading the marketing blog of the Canadian Marketing Association (the aptly named Canadian Marketing Blog), and found a blog post that was rather short (for that blog) but very stimulating.

http://www.canadianmarketingblog.com/archives/2010/12/canadians_continute_to_buy_mor_1.html

Some of the information stated in the blog was not very surprising at all; ie. Canadians are steadily purchasing more and more things online. However, I WAS very surprised to find out that the most commonly purchased good was not software, music, nor apparel – three products that we commonly associate with online selling – but in fact travel.

There was other interesting information here – online revenue increased from 7.9 billion in 2005 to 15 billion in 2009. It’s not unexpected that online revenue has increased, but I never thought it would increase by so much in just four years.

So what are we supposed to take from this? Well, for one, online ticket-selling companies are making lots of money. Invest in them. Secondly, and probably more importantly is that online retailing is rapidly becoming more and more prominent, and that, if this current trend continues, online sales revenue will one day eclipse regular in-person sales revenue – and in a time not too long from now. The Internet is the future of sales and marketing.

Companies nowadays are going to have to shift more and more of their resources into online marketing in order to keep up with their clientele. In-person sales promotion will become less and less important, and may one day even become obsolete. From a financial standpoint, this would be very beneficial, as companies would be able to reduce wages and salaries costs. New up-and-coming companies would be smart to focus on e-commerce – and that’s precisely what many are doing.

There’s also some very scary implications for society in general to draw from this. If human jobs continue to be replaced by computers, there will be number of jobs available in the market will continually decrease. In the most extreme case, humans will become obsolete – not saying that this will necessarily happen, of course. The world in general is becoming more and more reliant on computers (insert sci-fi movie reference), and that’s definitely not a good thing.