The Vancouver Sun –  November 28, 2011

Online shopping is gradually becoming more mainstream with a new survey showing almost half of Canadians asked say they’ll access the web for some of their holiday gift purchases this year.

The survey, commissioned by Bank of Montreal, had 46 per cent of respondents saying they would buy gifts this year over the Internet, up from 41 per cent in a poll done last year.

“This is a growing trend, with almost half of all Canadians now doing at least some of their holiday shopping online,” Douglas Porter, deputy chief economist for BMO Capital Markets, said in a statement.

Most of the gains between this year and last were with women, with 43 per cent in the latest survey indicating they would do some online shopping compared with 34 per cent last year. With men, 49 per cent said they planned to shop online this holiday season, unchanged from last year’s poll.

Such results were released on Cyber Monday, primarily a U.S. phenomenon but becoming more of an event in Canada. It is the first Monday after the American Thanksgiving and is usually the busiest online shopping day of the year.

The BMO survey was done online by Leger Marketing between Oct. 17 and 20, using a survey of 1,508 Canadians. BMO said a random sample this size would be representative of the population within 2.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.