Why Your Small Business MUST be Online!
Consider this: Although diminishing due to bad economy, average growth of e-commerce is around 25% per year. 81% of small businesses that have an online presence during last year's holiday season reached new customers, leading to an increase in sales and profitability according to a survey conducted by Harris Interactive.
Thirty percent of small businesses with a web presence and fewer than 20 employees now generate more than 25% of their revenue online claims Gartner research.
Every business is expected to be online, just as they are expected to have a telephone and a fax and an answering machine. Just as we have gone from " Do you have a fax machine?" to "What is your fax number?", so too are we moving rapidly away from "Do you have a web site?" toward "What is your web address?".
Compare the argument to the emerging days of the telephone. Business owners in the first half of the century grumbling that they don't need that new-fangled invention because their customers have to come in to buy stuff anyway. "Why would they want to ring me up and talk to me from a distance on that contraption? I can't afford to have it anyway! Who will answer the thing when I have customers in the store? What if it breaks down - who will fix it? What if I can't get the phone when it rings because I'm occupied with work?"
A comment of a well-known industry observer stated that companies that are not selling on the Internet by 2007 will probably become extinct. As dramatic as it might seem, and maybe a little exaggerated, there is some truth in it
The web presence has become as common and as expected as a telephone to small business. In a recent UK survey 85% of people suggested they would not buy from a company that doesn't have a web site!
