A lack of appropriate skills and an alarming lack of board level support is holding back the growth of ecommerce, a study has found.
Three quarters of the 100 ecommerce directors questioned cited a lack of appropriate skills and resources as a key challenge to growth, according to research commissioned by ecommerce software provider eCommera in August this year.
Some 59% also felt that a misalignment between different business functions led to a lack of effectiveness, while 54% believed that the senior management team neither understood nor gave enough backing to ecommerce activity. A further 48% did not have a good enough understanding of their data for decision-making purposes, while 47% said they did not have appropriate tools and technologies avaialable to them.
Michael Ross, a director at eCommera, said that ecommerce activity was sufficiently different to traditional retail to mean that organisations were struggling to get the appropriate specialised skills and resources in place in order to drive business growth.
“Given the growing contribution of non-store sales to retailers and the growth of online business generally, it is natural that ecommerce professionals are faced with so many challenges in an area that is still young and changing very fast,” he added.
The study was based on independent research undertaken by Coleman Parkes. All participating companies generated minimum annual online revenues of £3m and 40 of them turned over between £3m and £20m.
