Abstract

Numerous books and articles have been written advising businesses how to set up a successful ecommerce website and much of this advice is relevant to small businesses. The research reported here examines this advice to generate a list of tactics and then attempts to group the tactics into strategies which describe how small businesses are using, or want to use, the Internet. Results suggest that SMEs are very customer oriented, even when dealing online. Small businesses have traditionally always been customer focused, many know their customers individually, and it is interesting to see that use of the Internet has not eroded this as some had feared. This may be due to the caution many SMEs showed by being slow to adopt the Internet or it may be the cause of this caution. The results also suggest that small businesses find it important to use the Internet to apply traditional business tenets. The things that can only be accomplished on the Internet such as personalisation are not seen as important or are seen as unimportant. It may be that small businesses do not realise the Internet’s potential in these areas or if they do realise it, they do not see them as being useful.

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