Time Is Money

If you’re running a retail business, time is money. From regular customer interactions to behind-the-scenes inventory management, perhaps nothing can have a more detrimental effect on the time and money of your business than internet downtime.

Two things have caused internet connectivity to be such an important aspect of retail - the downfall of cash, and the rise of electronic transactions. Customers paying cash are today a small minority, if they even exist at all. Uptime, or internet connectivity, is absolutely essential to the flow of business.

Uptime

Even the difference between 99.9 and 99.99% internet uptime can be significant - 1 minute, 18 seconds a day to be exact. You can use THIS uptime calculator to see that also results in up to 8 hours annually. Multiply that by your average hourly revenue number and you can see the annual impact of just .09% downtime.

Internet speed and bandwidth can also have a drastic effect on a retail store’s bottom line. Whether you sell carrots or karats, if you can process payments faster, you can sell more of them. Stores with multiple Point-of-Sale stations can lose potential revenue not only by going down, but merely by being slow.

Upload

Upload speeds in particular are essential for the electronic payment transaction. Symmetrical internet (identical download and upload speeds) that fiber is built to provide provides an advantage over traditional download-heavy internet services.

For all these reasons, it’s easy to see that fiber internet provides an advantage over copper-based internet signals. It is capable of transmitting information at much higher speeds, with security and reliability that are exponentially greater.

For retail businesses, (Up)time is money.