A crucial season ahead for Canada’s small businesses

This week, Canadians have had our inboxes and social media feeds inundated with messages priming us to shop online and then wait by the front door for the brown cardboard boxes to arrive.

Come November, we’ll be hit with another onslaught of reminders to support online sales in the name of Cyber Monday to further help retailers make their sales targets before the end of the year.

E-commerce isn’t something new; however, the last seven months have accelerated the growth of online shopping faster than anyone could have predicted or planned for.

We’ve moved from a steady 1% of growth per year over the last 18 years, to an astonishing 10%increase in online retail sales in just the first eight weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As noted by Scott Galloway, professor of Marketing at NYU Stern School of Business, e-commerce has experienced a decade’s worth of growth in just a matter of weeks.

While the world’s largest online retailers experience unprecedented growth, our local small businesses struggle to keep the lights on.

With the second wave of COVID-19 taking shape in communities across Canada and the resulting increase in social distancing and safety measures, consumers need to realize that supporting the neighbourhood shops they love is more important than ever.

If we want to ensure that our local hardware stores, clothing boutiques, pet shops and artisan bakeries remain viable, we all need to do our part and make the extra effort to shop directly from these businesses as much as we possibly can or risk finding our main streets and downtown shopping corridors boarded up once the pandemic is under control.

As someone who works directly with more than 3,500 small businesses from coast-to-coast every day, I can tell you that we’re seeing collaboration and creativity like never before, all in an effort to keep the shop local movement alive during these difficult times.

One example comes from Grande Prairie, Alta., where the Chamber of Commerce purchased the local area franchise rights to GetintheLoop, a location-based technology platform that connects members with local businesses across Canada.

After a careful selection and decision process, the Chamber made the investment to help bricks and mortar retailers with little to no digital presence reach consumers in their community in a new and modern way.

This model isn’t unique to Grande Prairie. We’ve seen local tourism groups, Business Improvement Areas (BIAs) and even private companies step up to facilitate digital awareness and customer acquisition campaigns for businesses that didn’t even have a website a few months ago. Why are they doing it? Because they know our communities – the communities they live and work in – are not the same without a vibrant main street and healthy local economy.

Perhaps the biggest change we’re seeing is the shift in the way small businesses think of each other. In the past, local retailers would see the shop a few doors down as the competition. Increasingly, small business owners have come to the realization that their competition isn’t up the street or around the corner. The real threat to their survival is at the consumer’s finger tips and merely a click away.

With a little more than two months left in the year, I believe this is the most crucial holiday shopping season in our nation’s history.

If we simply rely on the convenience of online shopping and the pervasiveness of Amazon to get us through the rest of 2020, we’ll be doing our local economies, and the small business owners behind them, a terrible disservice.