How Businesses Use the Internet

Most discussion of business and the internet is about selling. That's one use among several, and for many businesses not the largest — the internet is doing more work inside the organisation than in front of customers.

Communication

The oldest business use and still the most universal.

• Email — the default record of business correspondence, and the one system nearly every organisation depends on.
• Video calls and messaging — meetings without travel, and the reason distributed teams are practical at all.
• Internal chat and shared documents — coordination that doesn't require everyone in the same place at the same time.

None of this is web browsing — it uses the same network for different protocols entirely, a distinction covered in The Web and the Internet Are Not the Same Thing.

Selling and reaching customers

• A website — describing what the business offers, available whenever someone looks.
• Online sales — direct, or through a marketplace.
• Marketing — search, email, social and paid advertising.
• Support — answering customers by email, chat or a help site, often more cheaply than by phone.

Where a business is only interested in being findable rather than selling online, Taking a Business Online covers the smaller version of this.

Running the business

The least visible category and often the one with the most impact:

• Accounting and invoicing — hosted software rather than a spreadsheet on one machine.
• Payments and banking — receiving money and reconciling it without a bank visit.
• Staff and payroll systems — including HR platforms of the kind described in Modernizing the Workplace with HRMS.
• Stock and supplier coordination — ordering and tracking without phone calls.
• File storage and backup — work that survives a failed hard drive.

Research and information

• Checking competitors — pricing and positioning are largely public.
• Finding suppliers — comparing options without a trade show.
• Learning — training material for a specific need, on demand.
• Understanding your own customers — analytics showing what people looked for and where they gave up.

The dependency it creates

The flip side, worth saying plainly: a business that uses the internet for all of the above cannot operate without it.

When the connection fails, it isn't only the website that stops — payments, email, accounting and phones may all go with it. That's an operational risk with practical answers: a backup connection, knowing which systems have offline modes, and having a plan for taking payment when the primary route is down.

The same applies to data. Business information held in hosted services is convenient and is also someone else's infrastructure. Knowing how to get your data out, and having a copy that doesn't depend on one provider staying in business, is the unglamorous counterpart to everything above.