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| What purposes do small business owners use the Internet for? |
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| The Internet has not only been useful for running small businesses but also has also helped them to succeed. OPEN Small Business Network 2002 Monitor surveyed about 500 small business owners/managers with less than100 employees and found that 66% found the Internet useful in operating their business. |
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| About 67% of small business that participated in a survey by Verizon SuperPages.com's Third Annual Small Business Internet Survey in 2001 found the Internet to be very valuable giving it a rank of 7 on a scale of 10. |
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| Several small businesses are ready to invest huge amounts to build customer relationships through the Internet. However not every small business owner wants to be another Amazon providing everything from online catalogs with credit card transactions, maintaining interactive databases about customer visits and choices and reengineering their backroom processes. |
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| Small businesses prefer to include a part of their marketing budget for owning a basic website these days. It is generally thought that small businesses begin with an email, a bit of surfing and then go on to become eCommerce giants with Backoffice and eCRM. However, this concept is misleading and can lead to failure of small businesses. These businesses are prepared to benefit from the Internet, and spend substantially for it, in ways that suit their methods of conducting business and are promising for their growth. |
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| Bigger businesses make use of the internet for several purposes including bidding, inventory management and to communicate with customers. It is wrong to assume that they have transformed into complete "eBusinesses" as a lot of their business operations are not online. A big business also benefits from the fact that it handles several thousands of transactions a day, leading to improved efficiency and reduced overhead. On the other hand, a small business manages lesser transactions and can’t devote the resources necessary to make major changes in its existing system. |
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| A large number of small businesses are in favor of the Internet which offers them an easy platform to conduct business with 24/7 connectivity to their businesses. Only a small minority of people said that they wouldn’t want to incorporate the Internet into their business as they are in favor of face-to-face transactions or feel that searching the Internet consumes too much of their time. In addition to being viewed as being much cheaper than other methods of promotion such as yellow pages, newspapers or magazines or direct mail the Internet is seen as a means to add credibility and communicate with customers making it the most sought after promotion tool by small businesses. |
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| Benefits of Internet to small businesses: |
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• Small businesses can announce their presence to the world through the web.
• The Internet helps these businesses to provide the buyer with information that helps him in buying.
• An attractive web-site will help in customer retention and make him come to the website again and again.
• Small businesses can make sales online through the Internet.
• An increasing number of small business owners are using the Internet as a tool for customer service and communications. About 50% of small businesses having a Web site communicate daily with their customers through e-mail.
• Small businesses are also using the Internet to create websites for promotion and as a method of communication with their customers. The survey found that 37% of small business that have a website used it to provide company information or promote their business online while 10% used it to sell their products online. At a basic level, small business owners with a website felt that having an E-mail facility was of top priority getting a rank of 8 on 10. |
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