The practicalities of running an e-commerce site…

Online businesses operate 24/7, 365 days of the year. You have an immediate advantage over real-world businesses that are only capable of operating their businesses during normal business hours.
However, running a business 24 hours a day every day makes significant demands on your time, and depending upon those demands, you might need to seek assistance to make sure that the ‘always available’ nature of your enterprise doesn’t swamp you.
For example, because your e-commerce site is always available, you may have new customers from the far side of the world that place orders while you are asleep. How are you going to dispatch goods, and how soon after payment is confirmed will those goods go out?
Most importantly, who is going to deal with it?
As your business develops, you would probably want to add products, new offers and the like to your site. Internet technology is always changing, and you might therefore want to include new features on your site from time to time as well.
Who is going to handle all of this?
The natural reaction when you are first starting out is to imagine that you can do everything, but in reality, it is impossible for one person to do everything. You will quickly find that you are buried under administrative tasks that make no money, whereas you should be focusing on sales and marketing.
For this reason, you should consider the requirements of your business, and then look at the practicalities of either finding people who can handle the day-to-day running of the business for you locally, or look at outsourcing through a site like Elance, Get A Freelancer or Guru.com.
The advantage of using outsourced workers is that you only pay them for the work they do and you only need them when there is work to be done. Consequently, using outsourced workers tends to be cheaper and far more flexible than employing your own people.
However, when you find good outsourced workers, try to build a long-term relationship with them, because doing so means that you have people available who understand your business and what is required of them, whenever you need them.