When someone asks us what we do in a social setting, you know, "What do you do for a living?" We used to have the advantage of saying we had a 9-5 job, and people would know what that was. Nowadays, as soon as we say we run an online watch store, the first or second thing anyone asks is whether we can get them something – but not just something. They'll generally be interested in acquiring a Rolex or a Breitling, and it's funny that so many people ask the same question. They assume that once you're selling one item or a bunch of things from some top-tier brands, you can get anything in the world. Whilst we can get them within reason, it's not immediate. We have connections, but it's not as simple as walking into a store and buying something off the shelf. More to the point, just because we're in the industry does not mean we can get anything you want at any cost!

There may be online vendors out there that do not carry stock, but from day one, we have always wanted to hold our inventory. There's something about it. We like looking at it, talking to customers about it, and having it at hand for ourselves. We stock dozens of watches and can fulfil your order as quickly as possible because of this. We don't take on any orders and then send an email to a distributor asking them to ship it as soon as possible because – you know – this guy needs it. No, everything is stocked in-house, inventoried and shipped out. While we were growing this business years ago, many companies came around with a digital list. They asked us to list all their items on our website and said they'd update it daily via an API. Yet, this way – even if they went out of stock – they would expect us to send them the orders, and we'd have to let our potential customers down. We never want to do business this way. I feel for us; it doesn't work for our company. So yes, our online watch store stocks tons of inventory.

Not true. Every brand is different. It depends on where they come from; the gamut margins are everywhere. Again, as an online watch store, we work in margins. A lot of people out there work in what they call mark-ups. So, a mark-up of 100% is where you buy for 50 and sell for 100. We call that a 50% margin; the margin is your profit over your sell. It just makes figuring out how much you make that much faster. However, it's not relatively that straightforward. It's all over the place. It can be less than 50% or over 50%, but everything is different. So, no – not everything is sold at double the cost. Plus, even if you know the price, many of the more unaffordable brands out there might make us buy back advertising. So, if we sell triple figures, a particular watch brand may make us invest 10% or a thousand back into advertising each year. Therefore, it's often the case that the money is not ours in the first place.

This is so false. People falsely think that just because we have no commercial real estate, like a storefront, we have no overhead. After all, a business's biggest expense – besides payroll – should be real-estate. It's not true. Some kind of real estate is involved, obviously for industrial space. However, besides payroll, our marketing budget blows up enormously. This is because the online market is much more congested than the brick-and-mortar field. If you're an excellent brick-and-mortar store, you have to attract people within a 30-mile radius or so? If you're an awesome online watch store, you need to attract everybody within a mouse click away from you. This can be anyone in the civilised world looking to buy a wristwatch. Many more online stores have far greater marketing budgets than brick-and-mortar stores. Therefore, if anything, they are bound to have similar overheads – if not more – than a brick-and-mortar store, but it's just focused on different areas

This is the last one, and this is the one that got us thinking about this page. We alluded to it at the beginning that some people who own online businesses just kind of lounge around all day waiting for orders to come in. Trust us; we don't. Despite claims that it's the ultimate "just not do anything job" and we wait for the money to fall from the sky, this could not be further from the truth. The many times we've worked in a brick-and-mortar business or pretty much any 9-5 job, we still had the company on our mind once we returned home. However, there wasn't much we could do about that. Yet, when you run an online watch store, it's 24/7. The store is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We work from the second we get up until the second we go to sleep. We probably work too much, but it's in our nature. So when people say that owning an online store must be doing nothing all day is baffling. When we switched to running our online watch store full-time, we couldn't believe how busier our life became. One might think, "oh wow, you have all this free time not going to work now". No, now we just have time to sit and think about the business and much harder we can work to make our business the best it can be.