Nearly half of Canadians will shop on social media this holiday: survey

Social media has become a key way for businesses to promote their deals. This is especially true during the holiday season, as all kinds of Black Friday deals are floating around.

In fact, 40 percent of Canadians plan to shop on social media during the holidays, according to PayPal Canada’s new ‘Social Commerce Trend Study.’ Moreover, the survey found that According to the study, Canadian social media users spend an average of $924 CAD/year shopping on social media platforms.

Overall, Canadians spend about 6.4 hours on social media platforms every day, according to PayPal. This certainly makes it easy to see how 46 percent of Canadian social media users say they’re more likely to shop on social media this holiday over last year’s.

Breaking the shopping down, PayPal says men’s overall shopping on social media is seven percent more than that of women’s. In terms of what people are buying, PayPal said the hottest items were fashion products (54 percent), electronics (26 percent), toys and games (21 percent), home décor (20 percent) and event tickets (19 percent).

Overall, 52 percent of social media shoppers admitted to making impulse purchases on products they saw on social media. Seventy percent of Canadians say they’re more comfortable with paying on social media using PayPal compared to 62 percent using gift cards, 54 percent with credit cards and 43 percent on debit cards.

Finally, PayPal says Facebook is Canadians’ most frequently shopped social media platform at 29 percent, followed by Snapchat at 26 percent and Instagram at 25 percent.

PayPal Canada collected data for the study using the Logit Group’s opt-in consumer panel. The study ran between November 7th and 18th, 2019 and surveyed 1,825 Canadian social media users aged 18 and up. The margin of error for the survey is plus or minus 2.31 percent.

Source: PayPal Canada