There’s a bunch of reasons, but I would say a top few include…

1. Lack of education – Many people don’t understand the power of the web yet. For example a few business owner’s I’ve worked with will pay hundreds, if not thousands of pounds to advertise in their local paper yet never thought about spend perhaps less than £100 on an internet ad campaign.

2. Can’t teach an old dog new tricks – Again this relates to education but I think many owners are set in their ways and if they think it is working why change / risk it? Their arguement is “I’ve always done it that way” and so that’s good enough for them, even if they could yield better results elsewhere.

3. Traditional media – The media love to jump on the bangwagon whenever things go wrong and are quick to write up interesting stories like how poor Mrs. Smith got robbed of £50 when bidding on a fake eBay item. There’s a few reasons behind this, but one is that traditional media is a dieing market and newspapers + magazines are no longer making as much money, especially as you can get the latest info on your mobile phone. So they often use tactics like this to ensure their offline business stays alive.

I hope this helps, keep reading the blog and good luck with your article.

Khalid.

I’m doing a research paper on problems in the changing business world and my topic is “Companies that fail to take their business online.” I have been doing lots of research and came across a few interesting things, but I must say, I appreciate having found your blog. I do have a question for you, though.

I came across a blog that explained, of course it’s an opinion, the top 10 reasons why some businesses are hesitant to go online. And even here, it is mentioned that a factor could be pride of “the old ways”. But all these reasons seem a little weak. So far I have not found one good reason why a company would refuse to go online… and so my question to you is, What do you think the reason really is?

You have a chance to be known by millions of people all over the world… To sell your products at any hour… To make a substantial profit on low cost items because you’re selling these items without the cost of shipping to you, the cost of building expenses, etc.; and you’re going to say that you don’t want to because the website might be difficult to maintain? It makes no sense to me… and Judge Judy says “If it doesn’t make sense, it’s probably not true.”

And I do fear the internet will mature in to just being purely dominated by a main top tier of websites. For me the whole point of the internet is that there is such a vast amount of websites and different opinions and information out there on so many topics. Funnelling everyone constantly into wikipedia and yahoo answers for information is one of my frustrations about Google atm. When sending searchers to sites such as your Trout.co.uk one would be far more beneficial to the searcher then the wikipedia page which is #1 in my opinion.

And on the topic of getting suppliers, manufacturers etc I also agree with you. Ive been working with a PR guy for one of the top comedians and he said the other PR firms for comedians aren’t interested in small comedy websites like one I own, they just want to get a write up on MSN, The Sun and get the comedian on a few tv programs, job done. They have no interest in communicating with online communities where the traffic may be comparably small but is incredibly targetted and can increase their web presence.

Certainly interesting times and it looks like running a small online business is going to get tougher. But this is business, so all we can do is adapt ourselves and push on. The strong survive and all that cliché stuff! Maybe one day they will ‘get it’, I sure hope so.

Apologies for this marathon of a comment btw Chris.

Johnny – haha I like the “youngsters” part

Clarke – Spending wisely is definately something these companies are not doing. Targetted is what they need and it just ain’t happening.

Yeah ok so thousands will maybe see the advert, fine if your selling booze or some mass consumer item but when you sell some services you need to spend wise and get targeted and what better way then on sites and services that are in same industry as you, except most don’t get it.