Canadian Tire, a Canadian retailer based in Toronto, will be celebrating its 100^th anniversary in October 2022. While the retailer started in the tire industry (as evidenced by its name), it has expanded over the years into a variety of product categories. In TraQline’s Canada data, Canadian Tire is the leading retailer for all products. Its next closest competitors are Amazon, Home Depot, and Walmart. However, because TraQline’s Canadian survey covers a wide variety of products, we can focus on a few of Canadian Tire’s categories to get a sense of how they fare against their competition.

A Look at the Big Picture: Lawn and Garden Mowers, Lawn Power Equipment, Specialty Non-Mower Lawn Equipment, and Nursery Products

As one of the top retailers in Canada, Canadian Tire is the leading retailer, capturing approximately 30% of the market, for these combined categories. Behind it is Home Depot, with Lowe’s and RONA combined taking the third place. If you count Lowe’s and RONA as separate retailers, however, Amazon takes third place. In addition to capturing the lead in unit share, Canadian Tire also takes the lead for dollar share.

Canadian Tire also over-indexes on retail store purchases, even when accounting for the large uptick in online purchasing during COVID. In fact, when looking at online-only purchases in this aggregation of categories, Canadian Tire comes in second for unit share behind Amazon. The retailer did have a significant increase in online purchases in Q1 of 2020, but rates fell again. Despite the decline, sales remained at an elevated rate compared to pre-COVID quarters.

Another area in which Canadian Tire excels is its high consideration rate. It is the first store shopped for one third of all purchases. Additionally, nearly 90% of TraQline respondents who purchased at Canadian Tire said that the retailer was the first store they shopped.

Now that we’ve looked at the big picture, let’s narrow our focus on some of these key product categories:

Powering Up Lawn and Garden: Mowers and Lawn Power Equipment

Walk-behind and zero-turn mowers, as well as outdoor power equipment (OPE), can be big moneymakers for retailers. Canadian Tire tops both the unit and dollar share for these categories. Behind it for unit share are Home Depot and Lowe’s/RONA. Canadian Tire’s place at the top for dollar share may be largely due to its high unit share. In fact, it has one of the lower Average Price Paid rates for the categories, at $279CD for Q4 2021.

For online sales of these products, Amazon once again takes #1 in unit share.

Digging in with Specialty Non-Mower Lawn Equipment and Nursery Products

Again, Canadian Tire takes the lead within these categories. Home Depot and Walmart take up second and third place, respectively, for unit share.

In online sales, Amazon very handily takes the top unit share, far outstripping the competition.

Truly a Top Retailer

As it stands, despite ongoing global supply chain woes, Canadian Tire has strong leads in these key categories. However, if consumers continue to become more comfortable making purchases of Lawn and Garden and OPE products online, Canadian Tire could face more challenges. While its brick-and-mortar position is strong, it does not capture as much of online unit and dollar share as  its main competitor, Amazon.

For more information about the Canadian market, contact TraQline’s team today!