How Edmonton Achieves Click-and-Mortar Success

Canadian Tire’s flagship South Edmonton Common location was the first store in Canada to feature a virtual driving simulator for retail purposes.

EDMONTON, Alberta—For a showcase of the successful merging of e-commerce and physical stores, it’s hard to find a better example than this western Canadian city of 878,000. An Avison Young topical report sums up the city’s newfound status in the report’s title: “Bricks & Clicks: Edmonton becoming a hub for digital innovation.”

Far from seeing e-commerce strictly as a competitive threat, national retailers in Canada such as Loblaws and Canadian Tire are taking an omni-channel approach, harnessing the power of the Web to support and expand their existing store networks, says AY. And Edmonton, the provincial capital of Alberta, increasingly is chosen as an entry point for new concepts, the report states. The report quotes Geoff Stollery, VP of real estate for Best Buy Canada, as saying that Edmonton is “arguably the strongest market for many retailers in Canada.”