On-line sales across Canada were brisk today, 100 sales a minute. And while that seems like a huge number, it compares to a Black Friday or Cyber Monday. Canada's own Shopify is handling the retail platform for Ontario and 3 other provinces, including PEI, B.C. and Newfoundland. Business on day one has been strong says the company's GM and CEO Loren Padelford.
“The volume has been great,” says Padelford, “There have been no crashes and we have seen a lot of people interested in this new retail market. It has been an exciting first day. There have been more than a million people that have hit one of the sites that we're supporting,” says Padelford. “We are already over 100,000 transactions and we're running at about 100 orders per minute which, by any means is a really strong day.”
Padelford says a good comparison to that is a Black Friday of Cyber Monday. But it doesn’t come close to the biggest day Shopify has seen. He says a Kylie Jenner lip kit drop resulted in a thousand orders per minute.
“It’s still a substantial sale,” he says, “and we expect it to get bigger over time as more sites come on line in Canada and people become more familiar with the stores and the products and they start to makes sales.”
