Are Canadian small businesses really lagging on the web?
CIRA, the dot-CA folks, marked “BDC Small Business Week” by publishing a blog post yesterday complaining “Canadian Small Businesses are Lagging in Online Presence“.
Once again, we were told that “Three-quarters of Canadians research purchases online, but only 41 per cent of small businesses have an online presence”.
The inference is that if 75% of Canadians are researching their purchases online, then presumably 75% of small businesses should be there to respond to the consumer queries.
But lets look at the source data. The CIRA Fact Book says
Only 45.5 per cent of Canadian businesses have a website. For Canadian small businesses – a significant portion of Canada’s private sector – this number drops to 41.1 per cent. While low, this percentage is on par with American businesses. In 2013, Google reported that 58 per cent of U.S. businesses do not have a website.
What’s that? Do you see what they did there? Mixing Canadian figures with the inverse of the US numbers?
We have 45.5% of Canadian businesses with a website, compared with only 42% of US businesses. Canadian businesses aren’t lagging and they are doing better than just being “on par with American businesses”; Canadian businesses are ahead of their US counterparts.
The source data for the CIRA Fact Book is Statistics Canada (Table 358-0193).
| Size of enterprise | 2012 | 2013 |
|---|---|---|
| Total, all enterprises | 45.5 | 46.2 |
| Small size enterprises | 41.1 | 42.3 |
| Medium size enterprises | 83.2 | 83.3 |
| Large size enterprises | 91.8 | 91.4 |
It starts to get really interesting when you look beyond the summary data and ask StatsCan to breakout the data by industry classification. Then we can see which sectors are really bringing down the averages. For example, only 27% of “Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting” businesses have a website, but that is a 50% improvement over 2012. Food and beverage stores are stuck around 22% and only 1 in 5 gas stations have a website.
The StatsCan data tells us that 100% of large enterprises reporting as Industry Code “Gasoline stations” have a website, but only 18% of the small businesses in that category have a site. That makes sense. I am more likely to look for a service station under the brand name, not the numbered company that happens to own the particular franchise location.
“Transportation and warehousing” is another category that has a significant difference between the small business figures (17%, interesting that this is down from 19.3% in 2012) and the large enterprise web presence (nearly 95%).
It is important to look at this data in combination with the number of businesses in each category in order to understand where the biggest challenges and opportunities can be found.
We need to do more to improve digital literacy among businesses and consumers. And, we need to improve conditions for businesses to adopt digital technology. But we also need more data and better analysis before proclaiming that Canadian small business is lagging.