74 Percent of Small Business Websites Have No eCommerce

Jun 9, 2016 by Joshua Sophy

Original Post: http://smallbiztrends.com/2016/06/small-business-ecommerce-trends.html

If you’ve been dawdling capitalizing on the ecommerce movement, you’re not alone as a small business owner.

New data from SurePayroll’s monthly Small Business Scorecard shows that only 26 percent of small businesses have an ecommerce site or even use their website in any way to conduct sales. Considering the push for small businesses to create an ecommerce and/or mobile site as a way to connect with customers, this paltry number is a bit surprising.

Again, 74 percent of small businesses surveyed by SurePayroll don’t have an ecommerce-enabled website.

How could this be? With the ability reach more customers, expand their brand and, of course, generate more sales and make more money, small businesses, you’d figure, would be champing at the bit to get their products or services online.

Well, 42 percent of the small businesses surveyed by SurePayroll say “the Web really isn’t that important to their business.” Twenty-eight percent of the small businesses in the survey said they don’t even have a company website.

So, even though most experts agree on the importance of a website, perhaps it’s the skills required to build an ecommerce site — or a website, in general — that’s keeping small businesses away from the budding sales platform.

Despite the growing number of DIY website builders — many aimed at small businesses — only 17 percent of that target market have tried them.

More than half (actually, 52 percent) of the business owners surveyed by SurePayroll who did have websites said they hired an agency outside the company to do all their website creation. Another 20 percent said they hired a freelancer. So, cost could be a factor in setting up an ecommerce site with many companies.

Just 11 percent of small business owners say they created their own site using their own skills to do so.

Overall, these numbers are a bit surprising and should be a wake-up call for small business owners everywhere, especially the 42 percent of owners who say the Web isn’t an important part of their business.

Ecommerce sales are skyrocketing and consumers are demanding an easier way to search and pay for products and services, be it just online or more specifically, on their smartphones. If you’re not offering this to your customers, there’s a chance they’ll find a competitor that is.

Spending an afternoon or evening checking out those numerous DIY website services that are available to small businesses may be hours very well spent. And if your company hired a freelancer or outside firm to create your site initially — and perhaps their invoice scared you out of calling back for updates — it may be wise to pick up the phone or send an email to find out what’s required to update your site to be mobile — and ecommerce-friendly.