More On Website Goals

I consistently am reminded that not all website owners — even ecommerce website owners — have purely financial goals.

Usually, I see non-monetary goals that are about ego or competitiveness. However, I got onto the B&H website yesterday – Saturday – (because they have great prices) and was surprised to see that the shopping cart was closed, but would open at 5:45 pm.

I whipped out my calendar and saw that in New York City, where they are based, nightfall was at 5:08 PM last night. Then I went to Shimon Sandler’s site. He did a piece that I read a couple of weeks ago. At issue were Orthodox Jews who own e-commerce sites and wanted to turn off the sites on the Jewish Sabbath. (This time, I actually noticed that he linked to the B&H site as an example.)

B&H is not a small 10-page website. They have 424,000 pages according to Google. They sent me a 420 page catalog in the mail after I dropped $35 for a jumpdrive and a USB cable there. Online weekend shopping will continue to get stronger as just about everyone has broadband at home, and this is a big (private) company willing to forego plenty of Friday night and Saturday purchases in the name of their beliefs.

Read my other post on this topic: The Web, is it just about making money?

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics