Small Businesses Putting Off E-Commerce Plans.(INTERNET & TECHNOLOGY)

Byline: Tim McCollum

Clothing store owners Diane Andrews and Annice Schuler are feeling peer pressure about e-commerce from their fellow women business owners in Farmville, Va.

Those members of Farmville's "Downtown Divas" networking group have been selling online for a year or more. But the owners of The Fashion Post are just starting their Web site, and have a long way to go before they can take their first order.

Meanwhile, Andrews' friend Rosa Mann is getting ready for her first holiday sales season since launching an e-commerce site for her home fashions store, The Ivy Trellis, early this year. Already, Mann's Web business accounts for nearly half of the store's monthly revenue, with customers coming from more than 30 states and four countries.

Small shops like The Fashion Post and The Ivy Trellis are venturing onto the Internet in record numbers, but when it comes to e-commerce, small businesses are lagging behind.

With the slower economy, however, many small companies are putting off e-commerce plans, according to a pair of recent surveys.

More than 5 million U.S. small businesses use the Net for business and 2.1 million have Web sites, but only 725,000 small firms were selling online at the end of 2000, according to a July report by International Data Corp. in Framingham, Mass. That's up 34% from 1999, but far below the number of firms that said they would launch e-commerce sites that year.