Does your ecommerce site consume you 24/7/365?

[olimits7]

Hi,

I've been getting into the habit of spending more and more time doing ecommerce related work each day; this can't be healthy...lol.

I was just wondering do you guys have an allocated amount of time that you put towards your site each day, and once you reached your limit you stop working?

Do you guys do ecommerce site related work over the weekend, or do you forget about the site until Monday?

I feel like my ecommerce site consumes any free time I have; which can't be healthy for me but I guess it's great for the site.

Thank you,

olimits7

[Digmen1]

Mine did for a few months, I was check my Stat Counter, Google Analytics two or three times a day and working on pages etc and trying to get links and searches etc.
But I have now realised that it was too hard and I will have to wait fro it to build up slowly and I will try to spend my time on other things in life.

[LifeinAsia]

do you guys have an allocated amount of time that you put towards your site each day

I set an absolute limit of 24 hours of working on my sites per day. Although I give myself an extra hour of time once a year (daylight savings time switch) for good measure. :)

We're a 7/24 shop, so I check e-mails and the sites throughout the day, including just before going to bed and first thing when I wake up. And I have monitoring to alert me with text messages to my cell phone if the site is down.

I do try to force myself to take extended breaks. And most of the time I succeed, except for the times I have a pressing project to finish. Then I can rarely relax until it's done.

[topr8]

I set an absolute limit of 24 hours of working on my sites per day

yeah, i hear you! sometimes i get customers phoning me up at 3am or such like because they don't understand time zones :)

[jackgordon]

I must say that YES my ecommerce website takes up the majority of my time. Maybe that's because I don't have things like children to worry about?

Its the first thing I check in the morning, and last at night. During the day, I get hooked on watching my realtime stats to see how visitors move around the website, and tracking the database to see what's been added to cart.

[HRoth]

I like that about the absolute limit of 24 hours a day of working on one's site! I did that for several years and then began to make a division between the business and the rest of my life. I did this by creating phone hours. Before, I just answered the business phone whenever it rang, pretty much. Now I am closed on weekends and close early on Friday. I do sitework on Sunday if I want. I've also tried divvying up specific tasks to certain days of the week, but that hasn't worked out so well. I have to force myself not to talk about the business to my friends.

[ytswy]

Man I feel lazy!

We have office premises and work a 9am - 5pm day. When at home I'm at home, and unless there is something really urgent I don't do anything more strenuous than checking the pending orders page...

I think I would go insane if customers could ring me at home.. :)

[olimits7]

Well I glad to read that I'm not the only one spending a crazy amount of time working on ecommerce sites...lol.

I need to start scheduling specific times during the week to work on the site, and once I'm done working I need to learn how to pull myself away from the computer; that's the hard part...lol.

[pbradish]

Does your ecommerce site consume you 24/7/365?

Big time. The wheels are always spinning. But I've gotten better lately, and can detach and go out and have fun without thinking about business so much.

[dpd1]

Mine definitely does, but it's not strictly eCommerce... We make our own products. There's plenty enough to keep me busy every day just doing web stuff, running around getting materials and developing new stuff. Then all the stuff still needs to get made on top of that. I've found that trusting other people to do things is very tough. Most people just don't give a crap... You tell them to do something and you're lucky if they do even the most simple thing right. It's at the point now where I've hit a wall. We are stuck between making enough sales to be extremely busy, but not enough to cover the expense of growing and making things easier on me. So I'm kind of scratching my head wondering what to do at this point. I use to wonder why people took out big loans for their business, but now I get it... You reach a point where you just get bogged down, and major growth is the only way out. But at this point, I'm going 7 days a week and have no life... So something is going to have to change. It doesn't help to have the commercial customers that continually want to put in orders at the last minute and have them sent over night. On one hand, you want to tell them... 'Hey, this isn't Amazon... I don't have 200 people working for me'. To take care of orders like that, I have to drop what I'm doing and the whole day goes to crap because of one order. But then I realize I can't tell them that, because if you let on how small you are, they start to lose confidence in you. Then it's even more frustrating when you find out that the stuff just ends up sitting in some warehouse for a month after that. Sometimes I think they do it just because they can. It's actually gotten to the point where I get incredibly paranoid about getting sick, because I know if that happened for even a week, everything would fall apart.

[HRoth]

dpd1, I very much sympathize because I am in a similar position. I can't really expand without hiring someone, but I have tried that and had the same problems as you describe. I worked out way to be a lot more efficient, and that has helped. But I also dumped my wholesale orders. They were way more demanding and capricious than retail orders and I didn't make as much money off what I was creating.

I am trying to tackle this problem by getting rid of anything I sell that doesn't make a significant profit, expanding the things that do, creating a new class of widgets that I can charge a LOT more for (although I don't know yet if people will buy them), and by branching out into other ways of making money, like by writing about what I make.

[dpd1]

Those sound like good ideas, and I've done similar things. Most of my products are aimed at an amateur market, but they also cross over into commercial. In my field, products that are deemed "commercial" often have much higher prices than the "amateur" ones, even though they often do the same thing and will work for both. I also sometimes feel that the only way out is to raise prices, thereby decreasing quantity and hopefully still making at least the same amount of money. The problem I've found is that consumers have psychological prices in their heads that make them balk once you go past a certain number, even if the difference is technically not that great. An experienced business person told me that... if you're going to cross that limit with people, don't cross it by a few dollars... Cross it by a lot more. If they're going to stop buying something because of a few dollars anyway, then charge what you really think it's worth, even if that's a lot more. Because you'll need that to make up for all the lost sales. I guess that makes sense, but it's a scary thing to do.

[HRoth]

It is definitely very scary. I would say I have had more problems with that than anything else.

[dpd1]

I guess this is why so many places choose to automate. Always thought that was a low thing to do before, but I sure get it now. A CNC would cut my production time down to a fraction of what it is now. I'd have to hire three people to do that, and they'd probably screw up 1/4 of the material.