People have told me more than once that I have strong opinions, but no matter how hard I try to change that about myself, it stays pretty much the same. So, in this article, I'm going to talk about my "opinion" on one reason why your small business needs a website, even if you only sell to people in your area.
Here are a few facts from Statistics Canada to get us started: In 2003, there were about 12 million households in Canada, and 8 million of them had regular access to the internet from work, home, or school. About 60% of all households had both a computer and access to the internet.
Now that we know how many homes had access to the internet, we need to know what they did with it. Almost 90 percent used the internet to look around, but what's more important for our discussion is that 34 percent used the internet to buy goods and services. That's almost double the number of people who did that in 1999.
Industry Canada says that in 2000, Canadian online sales were worth $7.2 billion. This is a huge increase of 73 percent from 1999. And no, it's not a mistake; it really is $7.2 BILLION! I'd say there's a pattern forming: both sales and use of the internet are growing quickly.
Industry Canada says that Canada only had about 4% of the world's e-commerce in the year 2000. Now, I'm not great with numbers, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't that mean that 180 billion dollars were spent in ecommerce around the world?
Let's take a quick look at the United States. www.tamingthebeast.net has statistics and predictions from December 2001. It is expected that 157 million online shoppers will spend $47.8 billion in 2002. By 2006, 210 million users are expected to spend $130 billion in retail sales.
Many people will be persuaded by the numbers alone to spend money on a website for their small business, especially if they work in a field where their target market isn't just limited to people in their own area.
But you say that your business is just a small shop in your town. Why should my small business have a website? What will I get out of the Internet? I've already heard that joke. David is the person I've heard it from the most.
He is the owner of the auto shop in my article "I Don't Need a Business Plan—Do I?" Long story short, his mother-in-law finally got him to write a business plan. His business is making some money, but I think it could do better with some marketing. I'd really like to get him to spend some money on marketing, but he's sometimes too cheap. So far, I haven't been able to do that. Anyway I digress.
As an example, let's look at David's business. So, his business is in Saskatoon, which, according to Statistics Canada, had just over 200,000 people over the age of five and almost 90,000 households in 2001. Nearly every home in Saskatoon has at least one car, which means that David's shop could help with about 90,000 car problems.
Not every car will break down in a year, and David won't be able to fix them all in his shop, but you get the idea. Some of them will break down more than once, too. I'm thinking of a certain Jeep YJ from 1988...
In 2003, 72.5 percent of homes in Saskatoon had access to the internet. This means that about 65,000 homes had access to the internet. And that doesn't include the people in the rural areas around Saskatoon who also have cars that need to be fixed sometimes. Now, let's say David spends $2500 on his website because he is crazy about marketing (which in my opinion is way too much money for a static small business web site).
But having a website is useless if no one can find it. People who type a word or phrase into a search engine stop looking after the third page, according to statistics. This means that if you want people to actually click on your website, it needs to be in the top 30 sites for the key words or phrases you are using.
So, let's say that some good search engine optimization was part of the $2500 that David spent. The person who writes the copy for his website makes sure to do research and find good keywords, which are then used well on the site.
She adds his site to directories for small businesses and does more of her SEO magic. Three months later, David's site is the second result on Google when you search for "auto repair Saskatoon." David's business could get 65,000 new customers now that they can find it through a search engine.
If he only reaches.1% of those 65,000 (not 1%, but.1%), he could get 65 new clients. You know your bill will be more than $100 every time you take your car to the shop, but if the average bill is just $100, he'll make $6500, which means that the $2500 he spent on the website was well spent. I'd bet that he'd make that much just on maintenance, let alone repairs.
I've never asked David about a website this way before, now that I think about it. I might show this article to him. He's the kind of person who thinks things through, so it might convince him to get one.
