The chart below shows the percentage of internet users by age group in Canada who shopped online in 2014 and 2018.
The bar chart shows the proportion of Canadian internet users in six age groups who engaged in online shopping in 2014 and four years later. The data suggests that the percentages of online shoppers across all age groups in 2018 were notably higher, and in 2014, the percentage of online shoppers compared to internet users decreased with age among those aged 35 and older, whereas four years later, this decline was observed among those aged 45 and older.
In 2014, 20% of the youngest cohort engaged in online shopping, whereas the subsequent age group had a rate of about 10% higher. By contrast, figures for all older groups decreased with age at different rates, with most senior internet users showing roughly 5% participation in online shopping.
By contrast, by 2018, this landscape had changed somewhat. The first two younger groups showed slightly higher figures than before, maintaining the same relationship with age, with the only difference being that this relationship could also be observed among individuals aged 35-45, at nearly 40%, reflecting an unprecedented shift toward this mode of shopping. However, in the older age ranges that showed significantly higher records compared to 2104, the numbers, similar to 2014, significantly declined with age, with the oldest users exhibiting approximately twice as high a tendency as their counterparts from four years earlier.
