I'm François Bouchard. I'm the owner of The Country Grocer and OnlineGrocer.ca, so our store is a little bit different. We're very much a brick-and-mortar store that decided to go online to expand our marketplace. Our shop is here in Ottawa, in the south end. We have 10,000 square feet, 26 employees, and the grocery store has been there for 50-some years.
Back in 1996 we decided that to expand our business model we should actually go online. At the time it was more from looking at predictions of what was going to happen and what we were going to do to keep our market share. In the grocery business we run on a margin of 1% to 2% as the net bottom line, so anything we could do basically to increase our revenue stream without increasing our overhead cost was the way to go.
We were the first to launch in Ottawa and the third grocery store to launch in Canada, which we did in 1997. Interestingly enough, our marketplace has now grown, with 96% of the customers we serve online being outside of our trading area, meaning an area of more than five kilometres around the store.
We now service customers across the country and in the States. We work with Foreign Affairs for expatriates who are posted abroad, and we do a tremendous amount of business up north in Iqaluit, Resolute Bay, and other remote communities.
For us, the key was to really offer that expansion to other customers—and to do it. It hasn't been easy. Obviously, we started in 1996 when it was all dial-up and we had to go through it. We're a small store, with 26 employees. We don't have resident IT people, and we had to grow the business as we went along.
We continued to grow that business, and that business model is unbelievable. Interestingly enough, one-third of the people who actually shop online do so for someone else. For example, we have two universities and two colleges here in Ottawa and we have a lot of parents who actually shop for their children who are here. The benefit of that is that mom can be in Halifax and shop for her children who are here. The disadvantage is that when we technically show up at the dorm with the groceries they say, “I guess mom is not sending money”. So we get a lot of that.