Empowering Canadian SMEs to Compete with E-Commerce Giants
Lead image by Vicky Oak / Pexels
By Ahmed Minhas
For small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) across Canada, selling online has become essential to survival. But the platforms that offer access to millions of customers are often controlled by the same global giants competing against them.
Ahmed Doha, a supply chain management and business analytics researcher at Carleton University’s Sprott School of Business, is examining the pitfalls of that access and whether there is another way forward.
His research considers a simple but urgent question: how can Canadian SMEs compete when titans like Amazon and Walmart also control the marketplace they depend on?
Backed by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Grant, Doha is developing a generative AI-powered cross-vendor experience model that could help SMEs collaborate and offer something large platforms aren’t designed to deliver — a more complete shopping experience.
“SMEs are resource-limited,” says Doha.
“Because of their smaller size, they’re constrained in the value they can offer to clients.”
Unfair Competition in the Digital Marketplace
SMEs contribute roughly half of Canada’s GDP and employ most of the country’s private-sector workforce. Yet in Canada’s rapidly growing e-commerce market — projected to reach $104 billion by 2029 — SMEs face structural disadvantages, where six of the top 10 online stores are American-owned.
Platforms like Amazon already dominate through scale, logistics and pricing power. They also shape how products are ranked, discovered and sold.
“It’s unfair competition when Amazon is considered because it controls the platform,” Doha explains.
“They let everyone bring in innovative products, then monitor which ones perform better than others.”
That control allows Amazon to identify high-performing products, introduce lower-priced versions and use algorithmic ranking, pricing and logistics advantages to pull demand away from smaller sellers.
“They don’t have a way out,” says Doha. “They risk being copied and outcompeted but are driven by the enormous opportunity that comes with the large market that e-commerce platforms introduce. It’s a trap they find themselves in.”
Turning Competition into Collaboration
Doha aims to help SMEs escape that trap by changing how they create value online.
His research proposes a cross-vendor e-commerce recommendation system and business model that helps independent businesses collaborate instead of competing for the same sale by connecting complementary products and services.
“Consumers are seemingly shopping for a product, but they’re really shopping for an experience,” says Doha.
Someone buying running shoes may also be interested in fitness classes, physiotherapy or wellness services. A family purchasing back-to-school supplies may also need tutoring, printing or other education-related services.
These connected needs represent untapped purchasing moments that are invisible to individual SMEs but generate unique value when brought together.
Instead of relying on a central marketplace, Doha’s model works directly within participating retailers’ online stores, recommending complementary offers at checkout.
“We’re proposing a decentralized approach that doesn’t require any participating vendor to invest or put effort in creating those collaborative opportunities,” says Doha.
“It’s on-the-fly and on-the-go in real time.”
Generative AI powers the system by analyzing consumer behaviour, timing, location and vendor fit to recommend bundles customers are most likely to explore and purchase.
For SMEs, the benefits go beyond visibility. By reaching motivated customers when they’re ready to buy, businesses can reduce advertising costs, capitalize on existing demand and pass savings back to consumers.
A Canadian Solution for a Canadian Problem
At a time of rising trade pressures and growing interest in economic independence, Doha’s model offers a made-in-Canada alternative that keeps value circulating domestically, rather than sending marketing dollars and commercial data to foreign-owned platforms.
Doha will build and test the system on Shopify, which powers more than two million online stores. Canada Post has also expressed interest in the project’s potential to consolidate shipments across vendors, allowing multi-store purchases to arrive as a single coordinated delivery.
Ranked first nationally in the SSHRC Insight Grant competition’s Business and Management category, Doha sees the project’s recognition as a reflection of the scale of the problem and the potential of the proposed solution.
“This research was ranked high because it directly contributes to empowering SMEs — the backbone of Canada’s economy — to create value and compete at a very critical moment in Canadian history,” Doha explains.
At Carleton, the project will also train future AI practitioners, giving students from a range of disciplines the opportunity to develop applied AI tools for businesses facing competitive pressure. Overall, Doha’s research could give Canadian businesses a unique way to compete by building something Amazon can’t easily replicate: a collaborative network delivering a complete shopping experience with lower costs for consumers and greater efficiency for vendors.
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