Online sites service everyday needs of start-up businesses

Often the biggest headache for the start-up is not winning the first contract but the pesky details of running the business.

Finding finance, premises, employees, temporary workers, lawyers, accountants, and payroll services - to name but a few - are tasks that take the entrepreneur away from their most important role - bringing in the cash.

A number of new Internet portals designed to help the entrepreneur cope with these problems have recently opened their virtual doors for business.

Allbusiness.com, bizbuyer.com, Onvia.com, Digitalwork.com, and Excite's Work.com are just a few of the sites designed to help the small company deal with the business of business.

In these days when outsourcing everything from pay roll to Information Technology is often required there is some justification for believing that there is a market for Web-based start-up services.

For one thing, the small business sector is booming and for another many are using the Internet to close the competitive gap with their larger rivals. In fact, more than 48 per cent of the 7.8 million small businesses in the US use the Internet.

Take Allbusiness and DigitalWork, for example, these sites are designed to provide the entrepreneur with information and tools to run all non-core aspects of their business.

Hiring an employee? Then you can log on to either site post a job listing which will automatically be reposted to many of the Internet free job listing sites. But it doesn't stop there. Once you find the employee you can carry out background checks to make sure that they don't have a criminal record. Once you decide to hire the employee you can download prewritten job offer forms and employment contracts.

Depending on the amount of detail required, Allbusiness will charge between $20-$2,000 (€19E1,881) for employee or company background searches.

"You can either just check if the prospective employee has a criminal record or you can do in-depth FBI type searches," said Teymour Boutros Ghali, CEO of a Netbased small business portal Allbusinesses.com in San Francisco and nephew of Boutros Boutros Ghali.

To assist businesses with marketing function, many of these sites also provide press release templates, the ability to advertise free on other small business sites, web design consulting, and tricks and tools to register websites with the search engines.

However, the major problem with this market sector or indeed with many vertical or destination sites, is that it's often too difficult to separate the "e" from the commerce, according to Mr Ross Rubin, analyst with consulting firm Jupiter Communications in New York.

Mr Rubin believes that in the last year the trend for electronic commerce has been away from the massive portal or online hypermarket and towards the boutique or special interest sites. This is good. It helps prevent information overload, but the problem is that it is often difficult to distinguish between information and advertising. Many so called vertical or special interest sites have business partnerships with the companies they recommend.

For example, a small business site may provide a list of recommended law firms. Some of these law firms may pay or provide free content such as employment contracts in exchange for the recommendation.

Furthermore, many small business sites hope to finance their efforts partly by providing the ability to buy stationery, computer equipment and office furniture. However, small businesses may be better served by some of the larger specialist office supplies providers.

Then there is a second category in the online small business services providers - pure electronic commerce sites.

Bizbuyer.com and Onvia.com provide the small business with ways to buy goods and services at competitive rates. For example Bizbuyer allows the small business person to put contracts out to tender. For example, if you are looking for a Web design, you can fill in a form on Bizbuyer citing the sort of service you want and when you may want it. The form is then routed to Web design firms which will bid for the contract.

So will these services give a much needed competitive edge to the small business? "It's difficult to tell at the moment," said Mr Matt Sanders an analyst with Forrester Research in Boston. "I would say that these sites are more widely used by high-tech companies than your average run-of-the-mill small company."