Even if your website is available to 200 million people world wide, if they don't want to buy, you are out of business, fast. The capacity to ignore this fact has always been a key indicator of the dream economy. We would all like to live in a weightless business world supply and demand were infinitely irrelevant. Alas the real economy is not so. Fail to sell product and you sink like a stone.
People like to shop local.
Although it is glorious to be able to buy goods and services from the far corners of the dream economy, in the real economy nearly all of us have a propensity to buy close to home. This is the case for goods and services of almost all categories. And even if there is demand from markets never before expected, the ability of the firm to support real business in these new markets is limited by the rigours of the real economy like shipping, taxation, market services, and competition. Contrary to the dream economy expectation of the demise of high street retail there is clear evidence of a revival as Internet drives customers to local retail. There is even talk of Amazon opening book stores so that people can come and collect their books themselves during working hours, thus saving Amazon the cost of shipping books to all corners of the world night and day.