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JUNE 2015 PRO INSTALLER
PRO BUSINESS
www.proinstaller.co.uk
Are you spending too
much on your website?
Research from Worldpay, the UK’s leading payments processing company, reveals nearly half (48%)
of sole-traders trading online say they spent less than £300 to get their website up and running.
The study of small
business owners found
three-quarters (76%) of
sole-traders take a DIY
approach to setting up
their ecommerce platform in order to keep
costs as low as possible, seeking out online
guides and getting advice from friendly web
developers.
38% of sole-traders said
they used a shopping cart
or website builder to set
up their ecommerce site,
while a tech-savvy 22% used
their own coding expertise,
saying this was the most
cost-efficient approach. Just
a quarter said they turned to
a web-developer to design
their website, compared to
41% of businesses with one
to nine employees and 48%
of business with 10 employees or more.
According to Worldpay,
web development costs
among UK ecommerce businesses tend only to exceed
£1,000 once the business
is turning over more than
£50,000 in annual revenues.
Small business owners said
adding an ecommerce platform to an existing bricks
and mortar retail presence
adds an average of 19% to
total revenues. Across the
board, businesses who had
added an ecommerce capability saw a return on investment within eight months,
with virtually all businesses
saying they felt the cost,
time and effort required to
establish an online presence
had been worthwhile.
Dave Hobday, UK Managing Director, Worldpay,
commented: “Advances in
technology are taking away
‘taking away
the fear factor’
some of the fear factor for
small businesses wanting to
get online, while tumbling
costs are enabling a generation of innovative and
tech-savvy start-up businesses to experiment and thrive
without the crippling fear of
failure.
“Small businesses with a
strong web presence grow
more than twice as quickly as those without, so it’s
crazy that nearly half of all
UK small businesses are not
online*. We’re doing a lot
of work to demystify the
process of trading online
for small business, stripping
away technical language
and talking to them in language they understand.”
Output boost for UK
construction sector
The output of the construction industry rose for the
23rd month in a row during
April, according to the latest
year-on-year data.
Figures from the Office for
National Statistics (ONS) show
that output levels climbed by 1.5%
during the month, in comparison
with April 2014.
The ONS also offered more
encouraging news in terms of the
sector’s quarterly performance.
Towards the close of May, the
statistics body said it thought the
construction industry had seen its
collective output dip by 1.1% over
the first quarter of 2015.
However, after assessing late
data, the ONS now believes that
the contraction was much less
severe, amounting to j W7B