75% of Canadians are eCommerce Users: Which Industries are Growing the Quickest?

It’s not news that everyone shops online nowadays. If you wanted to know that, all you would have to do is take a walk through a provincial town on a Saturday afternoon. The only stores that seem to be open are the big, national ones that have been able to withstand, and adapt, to the new online market.

Small, independent stores have been swallowed up and spat out by the likes of Amazon who offer same or next day delivery, on a wider selection of products at a cheaper price than small independents could ever hope to offer. In this article we take a closer look at the winners, rather than the losers of eCommerce, covering 5 industries that are really benefitting from the move online.

Online Casinos

Online casinos are perhaps the biggest winners of the move online. In Canada currently, the law is moving towards widespread legalisation, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t an online casino ecosystem in the country already.

With a lack of a regulated domestic industry, overseas providers have stepped in to the void and have, for the past five years or so, been taking hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues from Canadian gambling fans. When legislation hits, the domestic industry will see a huge boost, like it has done in other countries that have taken similar steps. There are already plenty of new online casinos springing up in Canada, and as you’ll see at Casino.org, they all have their own welcome bonuses and impressive win rates to attract as many players as possible.

Health and Wellness

The answer, seemingly to everything, during the pandemic was to take supplements and enrol in online fitness classes. The rise of video streaming social media platforms like TikTok have played a huge part in boosting the presence and sales of online health and wellness brands.

Whilst bricks and mortar supplement stores are still present, they are massively losing out to online competitors. The same is true of fitness instructors, who are finding it increasingly hard to match the prices offered by online coaches.

Food and Beverages

The rise of companies that pay lower working-class individuals a pittance to deliver luxury food items to wealthier individuals, often on manual forms of transport like bicycles will undoubtedly be studied by future generations as a warning sign that neo-liberal economic policy was failing.

That’s then though. In the now, online food and beverage companies are absolutely thriving, with the ease and convenience of services like Deliveroo and JustEat proving irresistible to customers.

Fashion and Apparel

Clothes are the new impulse buy across almost every demographic on the planet. Gone are the days of saving up money and going into the city to try on clothes with your friends, before making an informed decision about what item of clothing to add to your wardrobe.

Now is the time of super-fast fashion, with people buying clothes on a whim, usually based off a video on TikTok or Instagram reels. Quick delivery and free returns are furthering the appeal of online clothes shopping, which is indirectly killing bricks and mortar retail chains.

Media and Entertainment

In recent years the impact that streaming services have had on the world of media and entertainment has really come to the fore. Head to the cinema nowadays and the listings on offer are markedly less appealing and numerous than they were 10, or even 5 years ago.

The quality of new movies, many of which are produced directly for streaming services like Netflix, has fallen off a cliff too with development companies seemingly happy to prioritise quantity over quality.

In Summary

Online shopping is killing a whole host of sectors and, whilst it is increasing the profits of certain industries, it is doing so at the cost of quality and medium and long-term thinking. Netflix for example, might see its profits grow in the short-term, but in the long-term viewers will tire of Keira Knightley going on 5-minute monologues on a shadowy, dark screen.

Likewise, consumers will grow bored of clothing made of flimsy material and Luke-warm meals delivered by a bedraggled looking man on an e-scooter. If you’re an investor, you need to be aware of the short-term bubble that eCommerce represents.