The Beauty of an E-Commerce Website

What are the office hours of your business?  Is it the ‘typical’ 9-to-5 Monday thru Friday?  Or is it on a more retail schedule, such as 10-to-9 everyday of the week?  Or are you one of those rare enterprises that can be open 24 hours a day, everyday of the week?  Even if you are able to do this, (which most companies can’t), how much extra are you spending to support staff that can work 24 hours?  How many extra hours are you tempted to stay to make sure things are going well?  Did you know there is a way that you can keep your business open for 24 hours, 7 days a week without having to hire extra personnel or forcing yourself to work 16 to 18 hour days?  All of this is possible with an e-commerce website.

What is an e-commerce website?  Basically, an e-commerce website is a site which you use an online storefront to sell goods or services.  If the e-commerce website is selling goods, customers can browse through your site as if they were actually in your store.  They can even use a virtual shopping cart to keep track of goods they would like to purchase.  When they are finished shopping, they indicate they want to checkout, simply by pressing a checkout button.  At this point they pay for their goods using Paypal or another payment processor you decide on.  All of this can be done anytime, 24 hours a day.  This would also be the case with service-oriented e-commerce websites, though they don’t normally have shopping carts and checkouts like product-based e-commerce websites do.  A person just pays for the service anytime they want during the 24 hours your business is ‘open’. 

How does an e-commerce website, running 24 hours a day, account for time zone differences?  The answer is it does not.  Whether a customer is in the UK or the United States, the aspect of the e-commerce website being open 24 hours a day doesn’t change.  The only thing that might change is references to the time a transaction is made.  And many times this may reflect the time zone of your business, more so than the time zone of the customer.  But this is only for display; the actual running of the business during the 24 hours is the same all over the world in any nation with Internet access.