Small
Business Survey: Small Business Should Bite the Online Bullet Small
Business Survey: Small Business Should Bite the Online Bullet
Tue, Nov 05, 2002
Cathy Santosus, www.EcommerceTimes.com
Eighty-one percent of small businesses that maintained an online presence during last year's holiday season reached new customers, leading to an increase in sales and profitability, according to results of a Harris Interactive (Nasdaq: HPOL - news) survey released by Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO - news)
Online marketing strategy, your best bet to accomplish more web-site visitors on your website. (Edited by WebsiteKeywordSubmission.com)
Of those small businesses with e-commerce capability during the 2001 holiday
season, 59 percent said being online allowed them to increase sales, with an
average increase of 29 percent. More than half (54 percent) said it increased
their profitability.
Gartner research, too, shows an increase in the proportion of revenue generated
online by small business. "Thirty percent of small businesses with a Web
presence and fewer than 20 employees now generate more than 25 percent of their
revenue online," Mika Krammer, research director of the small and mid-size
business group at Gartner, told the E-Commerce Times.
The ability to reach new customers was the most important reason for having
an online presence, according to the Harris survey, with 74 percent of respondents
saying it was the reason why they took their business online. Respondents also
said they were seeking higher visibility and increased sales. Competitive advantage
and reduced costs were other, less important reasons cited for taking the online
plunge.
However, most small businesses are still relying on offline sales for the majority
of their revenue, Krammer said. "Less than 10 percent of small businesses
are generating a significant portion of their revenues online."
Fortunately, it has never been easier or cheaper for small merchants to create
an online store. Inexpensive hosted services now offer more functionality and
ease of use, making the value proposition of conducting business online relatively
straightforward.
For example, shopping carts and other e-commerce tools are commonly available
with virtual domain hosting service packages for as little as US$50 per month.
Small merchants also can use an online store hosting service, such as Yahoo!
Store, the e-commerce package from Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT - news) bCentral,
or the storefront options of Web site building services, such as Homestead and
BigStep, which recently was acquired by Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based hosting
company Affinity Internet.
The approaching holiday season likely will serve as an added impetus for more small businesses to take the leap online. The number of stores coming online with Yahoo! Store tends to ramp up at the end of the third and beginning of the fourth quarters, Bud Rosenthal, vice president of Yahoo! Store, told the E-Commerce Times.
"Growth in the number of stores has been very aggressive to date, up 40 percent from last year," he said. The Yahoo! Store platform currently hosts more than 20,000 merchants, according to Rosenthal.
Yahoo! Store combines Web hosting, a shopping cart, and catalog and transaction processing tools with targeted traffic generation. Yahoo! Store's biggest differentiation, according to Rosenthal, is its ability to drive targeted traffic to merchants.
Krammer agreed. "Yahoo! provides
a funnel or pipeline for small businesses to generate some kind of revenue versus
going to a one-off provider that might be local and high-touch but doesn't have
that ability to generate traffic," she said. According to Nielsen//NetRatings
data provided to the E-Commerce Times by Yahoo, Yahoo! Shopping had 27.4 million
unique visitors in August.
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