Most Australian businesses buy online but don’t sell online, ABS finds

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in 2014-15 most Australian businesses made purchases online, but only around a third made their goods or services available for purchase over the Internet.

The ABS today released its summary of IT use and innovation in Australian business, covering the 12 months to 30 June 2015.

While 55.7 per cent of businesses covered by the study had placed orders via the Internet (down from 56 per cent in 2013-14), only 33.8 per cent received orders via the Internet (up from 33.2 per cent).

The data was drawn from the ABS’s 2014-15 Business Characteristics Survey and covered 776,000 businesses across a range of sizes.

Businesses with a 200+ headcount were far more likely to be involved in ecommerce, with 49.6 per cent of them indicating they accepted orders via the Internet.

The income from online sales grew by 7 per cent in the year to $286 billion.

The ABS said that the biggest statistical change the survey found was the proportion of businesses that had a social media presence. In 2014-15, 34 per cent of businesses made some use of social media (and 71 per cent of businesses with 200+ employees), compared to 30.8 per cent in the prior year.