Michael Armstrong, an associate professor of operations research, and Narongsak (Tek) Thongpapanl, a professor of marketing and product innovation, both in Brock’s Goodman School of Business, recently co-authored a piece in The Conversation about the need for retailers to tailor their websites and strategies to their target customers, whether they’re across town or across oceans.

Armstrong and Thongpapanl write:

Annual online retail or “e-tail” sales now exceed $19 billion in Canada, AUS$21 billion in Australia, US$410 billion in the United States, and US$1 trillion in China.

In the United States, conventional retail is growing but e-tail is growing four times as fast. Amazon already captures 43 per cent of American online retail sales, and it continues to expand into new retail categories, such as groceries, and new countries, including Australia. Other e-tailers such as Wish are also growing rapidly.

In response, brick-and-mortar retailers are enhancing their online offerings. For example, Walmart and Loblaws now allow customers to “click-and-collect” by buying online and picking up their purchases in-store.

But e-tail isn’t easy. One challenge is foreign competition. Statistics Canada reports that 40 per cent of Canadian online sales come from foreign sources. That could increase if the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement winds up raising online duty-free limits.

Continue reading the full story here.