A survey recently carried out by E-Business Review magazine covering around 300 companies of different sizes and across a range of industries identified that only around 46% of them had an e-commerce strategy or had in fact implemented one. Of this, 84% had their own website, but of these only 2% used this for online transations.

This appears to have highlighted the fact that UK businesses still lack confidence about preparing for an e-economy, and the lack of skilled individuals that go towards supporting e-business and the lack of general e-commerce knowledge within industry.

Of these companies only 22% felt they were ahead of their competitors, whereas a further 31% of executives who were responsible for e-commerce felt that their companies were in fact losing interest, thus leading to them falling behind their rivals.

Some of these businesses stated also that e-business strategies were now low on their priority lists owing to the lack of skilled staff, problems encountered with maintaining websites and the costs of keeping a high-profile web presence.

Research has shown however, that those companies offering a wide scope of transaction channels both off and online tend to be the most profitable. Opportunities are still there for existing organisations to adapt to using the internet as now is the perfect time to recruit the appropriate technical staff to get their websites working for them.