AMI-Partners: E-com Revenues from U.S. SBs Exceed US$213 Billion.

Number of U.S. SBs embracing e-commerce has crossed the 1 million mark, says AMI

NEW YORK -- There's a boom in e-commerce revenues generated by small businesses (SBs, or commercial companies with up to 99 employees) in the United States, with gross receipts doubling to US$213 billion in the last twelve months. In addition, the number of SBs that have embraced e-commerce has crossed the one-million mark, up some 13% from a year ago.

"While e-commerce has yet to reach prime-time status in the SB market in the U.S., a growing number of SBs are leveraging the power of the Internet to help them run their business more efficiently and also help them to reach a wider audience," says Sau Lam, Research Analyst for New York-based Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc. "SBs have been slower than large businesses to embrace e-commerce, but SBs' interest in getting on the e-commerce highway is clearly on the upswing."

The results are available in AMI's latest report, titled Small Business E-commerce: Closing the Gap Between Haves and Have Nots. "The number of SBs that sell products either via their company's website, or via third-party e-commerce sites, has ballooned significantly," Ms. Lam says. "The AMI study shows nearly two thirds of e-commerce SBs expect their online revenues to continue to grow in the next 12 months."

AMI attributes the rising adoption of e-commerce among SBs in the US to a confluence of factors:

* SBs are equipped with the basic infrastructure necessary to conduct e-commerce activities.

* Nearly all of U.S. SBs have at least one PC and internet access, while 8 out of 10 of them are using high-speed connectivity.

* Almost two thirds of U.S. Internet SBs have deployed a company Website.

* SBs want to streamline business operations and strengthen customer services to build customer loyalty and attract new customers.

* SBs are facing pressure from partners and customers to automate the purchasing processes.

* Many new and improved solutions for easy-to-use Websites, hosting, and e-commerce solutions are tuned to SB requirements and give SBs more viable choices.

On the flip side, e-commerce adoption among SBs has been hampered by factors such as inertia (organizational resistance to change), inadequate internal IT resources, and security concerns. In some cases, other budget priorities take precedence and SBs simply don't see an e-commerce "fit" for the way they do business.

Given these hurdles, vendors need to not only consider an SB's technical readiness for e-commerce, but also their perceptions about e-commerce "suitability" to their business models, and their business and marketing readiness to implement e-commerce productively.

"Vendors must create more intuitive, relevant campaigns about the business benefits of e-commerce," Ms. Lam says. "These include educating the SB about the business relevance of e-commerce, raising awareness about the advantages that e-commerce offers, and allaying concerns about business risk associated with e-commerce that SBs may have. IT and telecom vendors need to go beyond providing e-commerce solutions to integrating with an e-commerce marketplace or community."

About the Report

AMI's Small Business E-commerce: Closing the Gap Between Haves and Have Nots report examines the state of U.S. SB e-commerce adoption, plans and trends, based on data from AMI-Partners' latest survey. This 29-page report, authored by Sau Lam, Analyst and Laurie McCabe, VP, SMB Insights & Solutions, takes an in-depth look at U.S. SB e-commerce adoption to better understand the demographic and technology differences between SBs that are using e-commerce and those that don't. It also examines the levels of e-commerce enablement among U. S. SBs, and compares differentiating characteristics of those SBs that can execute purchasing online, and those that require customers to place their orders via phone. This data points to key opportunities and messaging hot buttons for vendors and service providers seeking to match their offering to the U. S. SB market e-commerce requirements.

For more information about this study, AMI-Partners, or our global SMB research, please call 212-944-5100, e-mail [e-mail], or visit the AMI Web site at www.ami-partners.com.

About Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc.

AMI-Partners specializes in IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services strategy, venture capital, and actionable market intelligence -- with a strong focus on global small and medium business (SMB) enterprises and extending into large enterprises and home-based businesses. The AMI-Partners mission is to empower clients for success with the highest quality data, business strategy perspectives and "go-to-market" solutions. Led by Andy Bose, the firm has built a world-class management team with deep experience cutting across IT, telecommunications and business services sectors in established and emerging markets.

AMI-Partners has helped shape the go-to-market SMB strategies of more than 150 leading IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services companies over the last ten years. The firm is well known for its IT and Internet adoption-based segmentation of the SMB markets, its annual retainership services based on global SMB tracking surveys in more than 25 countries, and its proprietary database of SMBs and SMB channel partners in the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific. The firm invests significantly in collecting survey-based information from several thousand SMBs annually, and is considered the premier source for global SMB trends and analysis.