Majority of growth to come via online.

Launched today, the Powering Small Business Britain report from online payment service provider PayPoint.net unearths a broad range of changes that are forecast for British entrepreneurship over the next five years.

• 35% of small businesses across all sectors see the majority of their revenues coming from online income over the next five years

• 58% of survey respondents predict that the greatest growth in their turnover will be through online sales

• Access to more customers is the top benefit to moving online for 59% of businesses

• 36% of businesses have been able to grow through access to global markets as a result of trading online

In addition, the report identified a number of key themes in consumer behaviour that will affect entrepreneurism:

• Open innovation with risk sharing partners will be the norm for start-ups and small businesses

• Co-creation with core consumers to drive entrepreneurial thinking to deliver products consumers want and need

• Use of cloud computing will dramatically increase for e-retail as greater fraud protection and increased security make this a reality

However, there are some issues identified by the small businesses surveyed.

Unsurprisingly, 57% of the companies questioned felt that generating traffic and getting customers to their site was their greatest challenge.
 
Not having enough contact with customers to build a strong commercial relationship was cited as a barrier to business growth by nearly a third (31%) of respondents, though this can be offset with moves to bring customers into the development process.

More predictably, the threat of fraud (33%) and the complication of keeping pace with regulatory change (22%) were highlighted as being especially challenging. PCI Compliance is a particular issue, as, having recently become regulated, the cost of non-compliance has risen considerably.

Looking forward, over a quarter (27%) of the businesses covered see e-commerce as the future for their business but have not yet made it central to their commercial activity. Meanwhile, 44% acknowledge the importance of online revenues but are still only at the early stages of developing an on and offline presence to maximise revenue opportunities.


 

Share this: digg   del.ico.us   Newsvine   Reddit   Furl   technorati   Facebook

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Name (required)

Email (required) (not published)

Website

Title

POST

By posting on this website you are agreeing to abide by our website comment policy and all posts are subject to the approval of the website editor. We will remove posts that contain offensive or threatening language, personal attacks on the writer or other posters, posts that are off topic and posts that are considered spam or specifically used to promote any commercial products or services. Any poster who repeatedly contravenes the policy will be banned from posting on the website.