The e-commerce revolution has been hailed so loudly and for so long it would be easy to believe that anyone not pursuing business opportunities on the Web has missed the ride. Not so. Online commerce, for example, represents just 6 percent of the total retail pie, and if you combined the revenue of all the e-tailers in the United States, it would add up to about a third of what Wal-Mart alone pulled in last year.
But over the next five years e-commerce is expected to double to $271.1 billion, as a generation weaned on Amazon.com and eBay -- and hooked on one-click shopping -- demands the same convenience from their grocer, hardware store and beyond.
What does that means for small business?
"It's pretty much open season," said Sucharita Mulpuru, an e-commerce analyst at Forrester Research. Barring a few federally regulated niches such as prescription drugs, ‘‘you can sell pretty much anything you want online," she said.
But that message may not be getting through to small businesses.
According to Jupiter Research, just 60 percent of small firms have an online presence, and the smaller the company, the less likely it is to have a "dotcom'' at the end of its name. Forrester has found that the vast majority of those small firms are using their sites as little more than an e-business card.
Despite falling costs and the growing ease of building an e-commerce site (Yahoo! and Google offer free templates), only about 6,000 small businesses across the United States (less than .03 percent) are actively engaged in online sales, said Mulpuru.
While not everyone might benefit from an e-commerce component, South Florida entrepreneurs are proving there are a dizzying number of ways to make money off the Web. Among them are brick-and-mortar retailers who have found a new source of clients online and start-ups that are offering professional services in South Florida using workers who are thousands of miles away.
Starting on Page 4SB are the stories of four local small businesses that are learning to sell in cyberspace.
