Some new data has just came out of emarketer concerning Canada's online sales. The data refers to "online sales", which includes both sales paid over the web and those occurring offline (as the result of an online visit).  Statistics Canada says that private and public sectors increased 38.4% to CAD 39.2 billion (US 32.4 billion). Also, Statistics Canada reports that those sales have increased despite a stagnation in the adoption of basic IT technologies.

Major sectors in Canada include:

• Wholesale trade
• Retail trade
• Transportation
• Warehousing and manufacturing

82% of businesses in Canada use the Internet and 38% have a website (haha, this mean 2/3 businesses in Canada have no website, come on!). We need to get more businesses into the fold as 2/3 of our businesses are not even a part of all the google juice, blog love and 2.0...

Canada 2.0 means at least 50% of business should be online in 2010. From what I've seen, major sectors like construction, local services, restaurants, fitness centers, local businesses and the like are not taking advantage of the edge the Internet can provide over traditonal brick-and-mortar only competitors.

One other major factor you need to take into account is that "e-commerce as we know it", which is more "B2C e-tailing", probably represents ~5% of the overall online sales shown by this article. I will try to dig into that to get critical data of that so called "5%". Please share your thoughts - I want to know of anyone who's using the web successfully as a platform for business in Canada (surely SEOmoz has a few Canadian readers).

P.S. Canadian sites only (don't worry you guys in the US, you've got a default, geographic head start).