Finding 'Real' companies to research for E-Commerce

The start-up we are looking for

Part of our methodology in researching ecommerce activity of companies is to find which companies to research. We are interested in having an approach that allows us to take different sets. Currently we are taking an interest in recent startups in Merseyside. But we might want to, for example, look at comparisons between startups on Merseyside and in the South East, or manufacturing companies in the core cities. Given that we are searching for web presence, we can’t start with the web as this would be a self selecting group.

 

The start-up we might find

Therefore we have started with a list from, FAME (Financial Analysis Made Easy) which provides financial information on major public and private U.K. and Irish companies. We have used a selection criteria to allow us to choose the area of research interest (currently startups in Merseyside). Then we have given each company a random number and ordered them, starting at the top of the now randomised list.

 The first step of our methodology is to see if we can find the company basically Googling them (also BING, DuckDuck Go, Twitter and Facebook), whether companies have any presence is one of the things we are measuring. Our current startup Merseyside list is showing about 20% of the companies we choose have some kind of presence, 80% have no presence at all apart from the ubiquitous company house clones. It is probably different for more established companies, we shall find out later.

What is a Real Company

However what is a company? As human beings we can easily look at a company and work out whether it is a real company. However, we need a more scientific method of deciding what constitutes a real, distinct company for the purposes of our research.

Of course for starters a company could be listed with a registered address at their accountants in a different part of the country.

The waters are being muddied by tax and crime driven concepts. In recent weeks the media has noted the proliferation of dodgy shell companies (Limited Liability Partnerships) popping up in Scotland, BBC on Dodgy Edinburgh Companies, the BBC alleges that the Anderson Group and presumably others are encouraging firms to create micro subsiduaries to take advantage of national insurance breaks aimed at small companies. (BBC on company multiplying tax dodge).

It is a pain working through these special purpose companies to search for a web presence, but it is not just a matter of increasing the research cost. We could find that if these companies are regionally unevenly spread it would affect results. For example I guess we might find that companies registered in a single house in Edinburgh with 420 companies and I am guessing no web sites this could certainly derail a statistical analysis of e-commerce uptake in that part of Edinburgh.

Francis Muir, Chris Taylor, Johnny Read