Digital Tools Offering Channels for Success: Facilitating a Small- and Medium-Sized Business Renaissance
White Paper, 2023
Small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have recently experienced a period of growth following decades of decline that coincided with the advent of big-box stores. According to a recent white paper by Analysis Group authors and Professor Edward Fox, this change in fortune has been driven in large part by third-party facilitators – such as Etsy, Shopify and PayPal – that provide SMBs with access to services they may not ordinarily have the bandwidth to handle in house. Outsourcing functions allows SMBs to build economies of scale and scope that previously were only available to larger companies.
According to the authors – Analysis Group Manager Maria Mercedes (Marimer) Guevara, Managing Principals Edward Tuttle and Brian S. Gorin, and academic affiliate Edward J. Fox – a major service that third-party facilitators offer SMBs is the ability to create or use multichannel and omnichannel go-to-market strategies. Multichannel strategies enable businesses to sell products through both offline and digital channels, while omnichannel strategies allow them to create an integrated sales approach by linking these two channels. By adopting a multichannel strategy, a local restaurant might, for example, serve food on premise and deliver to customers who order online. Examples of omnichannel tools include the ability for customers to buy online and pickup in store or check store inventories online. The authors detail how these strategies, which are enabled by the use of facilitators, are key to driving the current and future growth of SMBs by allowing them to reach more customers, increase sales, and compete with incumbents.
The white paper, Digital Tools Offering Channels for Success: Facilitating a Small- and Medium-Sized Business Renaissance, was commissioned by the Computer & Communications Industry Association Research Center.