More than half of SMEs struggling to manage external suppliers

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BaseKit, the leading website building platform, has revealed the issues facing SMEs when managing external suppliers. In a survey of 500 decision makers in businesses with 25 employees or less, a staggering 51 percent felt that their business would perform better if they didn’t have to worry about multiple suppliers.

The survey revealed:

●      Over a third of businesses have no idea how many external suppliers they use

●      Of those that did, over 40 percent use more than 3 suppliers 

●      40 percent of SMEs have to manage multiple payments each month

The research was carried out by BaseKit to understand the impact on SMEs of managing multiple suppliers. Almost half of SMEs surveyed also revealed they are currently bundling their personal services such as the home phone, broadband and TV with one supplier, demonstrating an appetite for single sourcing that could be easily adopted to their business.

BaseKit’s CEO Juan Lobato said: “Consumers demand high quality, seamless services, both at work and at home. Trying to manage multiple service providers in high stress situations directly correlate’s with a service provider’s customer churn.  Creating a one stop shop will take the pressure off SMEs whilst creating a sticky approach for service providers that reduces churn.

“Smaller, more dynamic companies, often won’t have an IT or facilities department to take care of their suppliers and this is a big issue for SMEs trying to survive in a competitive economy.

“We have seen service providers beginning to accommodate SMEs via bundle packages and it is only a matter of time before businesses are able to incorporate their entire service needs under one roof: from hosting to packaged cloud services, SMEs will pick one supplier and be able to create their business from scratch.”

BaseKit is a platform that enables small businesses and designers to build and manage pleasing websites entirely in the browser. BaseKit’s website editor is available in 16 languages and multiple integrations are supported. For more information, please visit: http://www.basekit.com/blog