Small Businesses
Yet to Move Into the Internet in a Big Way
Majority of small
businesses is plodding their way to e-commerce. Unlike the
bigger corporate shops, smaller companies have been slower to
embrace electronic commerce. Of those traditional businesses
that join the Internet foray, most of them merely use their Web
sites as corporate brochures.
By
Isabel M. Isidro
Managing Editor
Majority of small businesses is plodding their way to
e-commerce. Unlike the bigger corporate shops, smaller companies
have been slower to embrace electronic commerce. According to a
survey commissioned by Advantage Payroll Services ( http://www.advantagepayroll.com)
and conducted
by McBain Associates, many small businesses are just dipping
their toes into e-commerce.
The study finds that small entrepreneurs "appear to be
moving into full-fledged e-commerce at a relatively slow
rate." While the number of small Internet entrepreneurs are
rising, almost a third (71 percent) of brick-and-mortar business
owners indicated that only 20 percent or less of their business
is conducted over the Internet. In fact, only a tenth (11
percent) are using the Internet and the Web extensively to
complement or support their business operations.
The small businesses with online presence mostly use their
corporate Web sites to describe their companies and what they
do. Archives One, a records management and storage company based
in Connecticut, launched their Web site (http://www.archivesone.com
)
last year for this purpose. According to A.J. Wasserstein,
President of Archives One, "In general we use our web site
as a corporate brochure."
Of those business owners who use the Internet in conducting
business, majority uses it in marketing (80 percent), purchasing
(69 percent) and recruiting (57 percent). For Archives One,
Wasserstein says "we are in the process of spending a lot
of energy, and money on Web-enabling our organization to conduct
significant portions of our non-value added tasks online.
Examples of this are purchasing uniforms, office supplies,
accessing healthcare data for staff, ordering printed good,
etc."
Nonetheless, 73 percent of the respondents believe that
e-commerce has dramatically changed the way most companies do
business. As Wasserstein proclaims, "We are really using
the Web to better run our business."
