Something has just become apparent to me .... most of my customers are night owls.
No matter what part of my business 'empire' they buy through, most purchase between 10-11pm on week days. About 35% deal with any ongoing aspect in the morning before work, but very few actually do the transaction process during the day.

What to other people find?

Well Matte depending on services, products, and business model, the shopping times and sales spikes will vary greatly. If I were to identify trends and sales spikes I would say that our bulk sales are made during regular business hours, Monday through Friday. Individual sales are fairly consistent, 7 days a week, but I would say that there are sales spikes that coincide with when people start or end their work shifts. Based on my own analysis of our sales data… I would say that about 25% to 30% of our individual sales are made while customers are at work.

Keep in mind that our target customers are middle aged working class and businesses. So they tend not to stay up late or they have to stay withing the confines of regular business hours. (But that also helps guide us in our direct marketing efforts.)

But I do want to add another factor, that being Google. I live in California and its not uncommon for them to play around with a layer in the algo (local results) during the weekend. I know our business well and its fairly easy to pick out temporary mood swings in the organic search. There is one layer that when active, will trigger a ranking for a broad singular word that will bump Web sales by at least 5%, another one seems to increase call loads from locals, but a few hours later it all goes away.

My observation is based on the times that are in the cart - the actual payment time.

I found it interesting that no matter if the customer was in Australia or the USA, buying a caricature or buying a shirt, flowers or an automotive part, it was this 10-11pm time slot that was very prevalent.

I guess that said most of the sales are retail, not business.

If a 1 hour window is jumping out at you... it may be worth further investigation so you can find a way to widen the window, honestly it seems a bit abnormal. I talk to a few unrelated online retailers daily and they don’t really report anything different than I do.

One of the sites (in a different geographic time zone) whose ticket sales are split between Japan and the USA reports the sales are pretty consistent timewise. To the best of my knowledge none of our group sees a unit of time that really stands out. The day of the week yes, but not a particular time of day.

talking about another site (not SR), we don't do a heck of a lot of consumer sales, but the little we do does seem to take place in the evenings or at night.

I believe that's because that site's audience may not necessarily be surfing the net during the day (due to other occupations)

as WS mentioned- i believe it really depends on your market

I would be inclined to think that if we sold products through SR we would get more daytime sales as many people visit SR while at work or during regular business hours