B2B websites fall in Net league tables
Business-to-business websites are suffering from an extremely low take-up, according to new figures from internet research company MMXI Europe.
Its figures, provided exclusively to Accountancy Age, show B2B sites accounted for a mere 6.6% of all internet transactions in July. Business to consumer sites, offering financial services, are much more popular.
Egg.com topped the league table.
The survey showed B2B sites received a total of 711,000 visits during July, out of a total of 10,754,000 hits on business and finance sites.
But despite the low count, many believe the B2B market will expand enormously during the next 18 months to two years.
Andreas Gutjahr, European marketing manager with MMXI Europe, said: ‘B2B is clearly an area with immense potential for growth, and one would expect to see the percentage share of e-commerce in this sector increase rapidly in the near future.’
Also this week, PricewaterhouseCoopers unveiled a survey which it claims shows dotcoms are in danger because they are sacrificing customer service in favour of attempts at short-term profiteering.
Read Jonathan Ball’s News Analysis – ‘B2B set for blast off’
- Online food and drink marketplace, Efdex, yesterday became the first major B2B casualty to fail in Europe, according to the Financial Times. The company spent around £41m of funding in two years and has now begun the task of infoming creditors of its move into liquidation. At the height of optimism surrounding online B2B exchanges, Efdex employed around 200 people in its Reading office.