WHEN IT COMES TO SHOPPING, CANADIANS AREN’T CLICKING.

TORONTO • While bricks and mortar retailers remain justifiably panicked about losing sales to digital-only ecommerce players like Amazon, it still comes as a surprise to learn that online sales account for just two per cent of Canadian retail activity.

Just as the country was hit last week with a deluge of marketing for the shopping bonanzas of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, new data from Statistics Canada released alongside the September retail figures revealed that in-store retail accounts for 98 per cent of Canadian retail sales, a total of $389 billion out of the $397 billion in sales, in the first nine months of the year.

Until now, the agency had reported retail e-commerce activity in this country with a time lag of one to two years.

“Considering that we have heard larger numbers from all sorts of sources in the past, the fact that it is actually that small comes as a surprise,” says Toronto-based retail analyst Ed Strapagiel.

That doesn’t mean traditional store-based retailers can rest easy as they roll out their own digital operations, Strapagiel added, but the actual numbers are far below a spate of market research estimates in recent years that pegged Canadian ecommerce at closer to six per cent of retail sales, and a widely cited estimate that retail ecommerce would account 10 per cent of all retail sales by 2019.

“Most of the online shopping tracking in Canada was based on projections rather than actual sales data from retailers, and many (market research firms) were including more than actual retail in there — a lot of them include travel, accommodations, entertainment, telecom services and even food service.”

While the total may be relatively minuscule, the dominance of so-called “pure-play” or digital-only retailers in online shopping is clear.

StatsCan reported out of $8.1 billion in total ecommerce retail sales in the first nine months of the year, $6.3 billion in sales went to digital only players such as Amazon. ca and Well.ca. The remainder of online retail sales, some $1.86 billion, was spent by consumers at traditional retailers with an expanding online footprint, such as Indigo, Lululemon and Hudson’s Bay.

“We are starting to see a segmentation in consumer behaviour,” said Vince Guzzi, managing partner at retail consultancy Watt International in Toronto. “People are starting to cherry-pick when a digital solution makes sense and what a physical store will deliver.”

Take Black Friday, a relatively new shopping event in Canada that saw a glut of consumers flood this country’s shopping malls this year for pre-holiday deals. By 1 p.m. ET on Nov. 25, transactions per second at Canadian bricks-and-mortar stores had surpassed the number of store transactions for Black Friday in 2015, according to payments processor Moneris.

As defined by Statistics Canada, e-commerce covers items that are delivered to a consumers’ home and those that are purchased online and picked up by customers at a store, the so-called “click and collect” model demonstrated by Canadian Tire and select Loblaw stores.

While just 0.5 per cent of the sales for Canadian bricks and mortar retailers come from e-commerce, traditional retailers aiming to stay at the forefront of industry trends have been investing heavily in the model.

Market research firm eMarketer predicts Canadian retail sales will grow 1.7 per cent this year to $522.6 billion, with a 15 per cent increase in e-commerce sales.