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Chapter 4 E-environment 207

1 Variation in organization characteristics
Size of company (employees or turnover)
Industry sector and products
Organization type (private, public, government, not-for-profit)
Division
Country and region.
2 Individual role
Role and responsibility from job title, function or number of staff managed
Role in buying decision (purchasing influence)
Department
Product interest
Demographics: age, sex and possibly social group.

B2B profiles
We can profile business users of the Internet in a similar way to consumers by assessing:

1 The percentage of companies with access. In the business-to-business market, Internet access
levels are higher than for business-to-consumer. The European Commission (2007) study
showed that over 99% of businesses in the majority of countries surveyed have Internet
access (Figure 1.10). Understanding access for different members of the organizational
buying unit amongst their customers is also important for marketers. Although the
Internet seems to be used by many companies we also need to ask whether it reaches the
right people in the buying unit. The answer is ‘not necessarily’ – access is not available to
all employees. This can be an issue if marketing to particular types of staff who have shared
PC access, such as healthcare professionals for example.
2 Influenced online. In B2B marketing, the high level of access is consistent with a high level
of using the Internet to identify suppliers. As for consumer e-commerce, the Internet is
important in identifying online suppliers rather than completing the transaction online.
This is particularly the case in the larger companies.
3 Purchase online. The European Commission (2007) survey revealed that there is a large vari-
ation in the proportion of businesses in different countries who order online, with the figure
substantially higher in countries such as Sweden and Germany in comparison to Italy and
France for example. This shows the importance of understanding differences in the environ-
ment for e-commerce in different countries since this will dramatically affect the volume of
leads and orders generated through e-channels. It also suggests the importance of education
and persuasion in encouraging partners to migrate to these new electronic channels.

In summary, to estimate online revenue contribution to determine the amount of invest-
ment in e-business we need to research the number of connected customers, the percentage
whose offline purchase is influenced online and the number who buy online.

Adoption of e-business by small and medium enterprises
The European Commission (2007) reviewed SME adoption of the Internet across Europe.
The results are shown in Figure 4.6. The adoption for different e-commerce services is
indexed, where 1 equates to equal access and figures less than 1 show lower levels of usage
within SMEs. You can see that access and broadband usage levels are slightly lower for SMEs,
but with online buying and selling significantly lower. Electronic integration of processes
with other partners is very low.
Daniel et al. (2002) researched e-business adoption in UK SMEs and found a similar
staged progression to those reviewed in Chapter 5. They noted four clusters – firms in the first
cluster (developers) were actively developing services, but were limited at the time of research.
The other clusters are: (2) communicators, those where e-mail is being used to communicate
internally and within customers and suppliers, (3) web presence and (4) transactors.