Is Getting Australian Business Online right for your business?

The fact that half the country’s businesses still don’t have a website is worrying, as more and more customers are moving online in order to search for products and services.

Last week accounting software provider MYOB and search giant Google announced the Getting Australian Business Online initiative to make establishing a website easier for those 50% of Aussie businesses that aren’t on the web.

Tim Reed, MYOB’s Chief Executive, said at the launch they had identified three barriers to these businesses going online – fear, time and cost. All three barriers are addressed by the Getting Australian Business Online service; it’s free, simple and takes less than half an hour to configure.

The service is gratis for the first year and $5 a month afterwards, the domain name can be transferred anytime at no cost.

Providing the domain name for free saves a business around $40 and the simple question and answer driven set up wizard gets the website up quickly and painlessly. For time-poor business owners it’s probably half an hour well spent.

The results are a fairly basic site, with the template showing the business’ location, contact details, some links and a description of the enterprise. Advanced users have the option of adding an image gallery and additional information pages. While the sites won’t win awards, they do achieve their stated aim of getting a business online quickly.

An important thing to consider is that the service has no online selling facilities beyond a contact phone number. There is no way to integrate a sales feature and any links, HTML coding or Javascript will be stripped out of the site. So these pages are really only for the most basic online presence.

The biggest downside with the free service is businesses won’t get an email address; instead they have to rely on their ISP or a webmail services, which is not always the best look.

Another drawback is integration with Google Places isn’t particularly tight, so creating a business profile in Google Places is still necessary. MYOB says they are looking at adding features soon that will include links to eCommerce services and their own accounting services with open Application Program Interfaces (APIs) that will let people connect other services.

There are other cheap options available, registering a domain name for around $20 year and then using Google’s free Blogger platform is a straightforward alternative and there are other options using hosted services like WordPress, Weebly and Squarespace which, while a little more complex and expensive, meet the needs of most businesses with a lot more flexibility.

While MYOB’s CEO believes there are three barriers, there is in fact a fourth – many businesses think they don’t need to be on the web. That’s changing as customers abandon Yellow Pages and the local classifieds and this service is for those who haven’t made the change.

Because Getting Australian Business Online is a basic product with the aim of getting a business up on the web quickly, there’s little in the way of bells, whistles or customisation. If you want a more scalable, sophisticated or flexible presence then you’re going to have to look elsewhere and you’re probably not the target market anyway.

Overall this is a good service for the micro business or the entrepreneur who’s just starting out. For many businesses this is just what they need at a price a lot cheaper than classified ads in the local papers or the Yellow Pages.

Paul will be holding a masterclass that will get a small business fully online in two hours on March 24 at Mosman, NSW. Seats are still available.