Driving Business Online four months on
You may have heard about a major industry initiative to help small businesses go online called Driving Business Online (possibly even in this blog article explaining the initiative by my colleague, Natalie).
If not, it’s a national campaign that recently sent a blue bus full of small business advisers through regional NSW. There’s also the Driving Business Online website, which offers advice and some subsidised services to help small businesses start a basic website.
With the on-the-road campaign wrapped up for 2011, we caught up with Emma Hunt, who as well as organising Driving Business Online, is the head of Paypal Australia’s small-medium business division.
According to Emma, more than 500 small-medium businesses visited the bus, looking for advice about everything from getting online to building traffic.
One of the most interesting stories Emma and her team have come across came from the founders of online business ‘Hardware2u’. It starts out as a familiar story – a misjudged Christmas shopping season in 2005 left the business with huge amounts of excess stock. Then comes an interesting twist – business founder Scott Asbey-Palmer decided to sell some of his stock on eBay, and became one of the first businesses to sell hardware on the site. Three years later he closed his bricks and mortar shop to focus on his online store.
Emma said the hope is that small businesses who visited the bus will take the advice on board and find similar success for themselves.
“Our eCommerce experts hosted 192 one-on-one consultations with businesses looking to take advantage of the online opportunity,” Emma said. “It is too soon to know how many of these businesses are now online and enjoying high trading volumes, but we will keep in touch and provide ongoing guidance as they grow their business online.”
Emma and her colleagues haven’t finalised plans for next year, but they’re still delivering advice through their website. At the moment, some of the most popular content includes articles on search engine optimisation and online marketing.
By Nick, DBCDE
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great post. I’d like to take a part in the initiative and educate SME business owners
Great initiative, is there are map or schedule of towns?
We are finding that a lot of people coming onboard in the last couple of months have been regional customers. The number one request “We want to sell online” People in regional areas are realising the potential and its exciting to be enabling these SME’s. Most are now also very open to using PayPal for low-cost merchant facilities.
As Dr. Greg, I also ould like to take a part in the initiative and educate SME business owners in AU.
I am very happy to be involved in this initiative. In the health area there is some resistance to business going online. I think this may stem from a misunderstanding about the “how”. Old ways perhaps don’t work on line. “New ways” may work better. We supply hearing aids that people can set up themselves, but the whole technology story is different to hearing aids you buy from a store. We support on line, and we provide great service and we save our customer lots of money. But all over the health sector I hear resistance to online from providers – rarely from patients.
‘Driving Business Online’ was a great concept and continues to be a success for small businesses in Australia.
As business owners are educated on the process and how it works, more and more business owners are deciding to go online and are reaping the rewards!
I love reading about online success stories like ‘Hardeware2u’. It is very inspiring!