Still hiding from customers?
For a business site to be accepted into World Site Index we insist that the site clearly displays a phone number, trading address and offers an online contact method.
However despite stating this fact on the submissions form, many business sites are submitted with only an email address and if lucky a phone number.
Those companies with only an email address fail to cater to the situation where for whatever reason the customers emails fail to get delivered to their inbox, this just results in a frustrated customer who has little choice but to do a chargeback on their credit card. This of course looses a sale, but what about additional business that may have come from that customer recommending the company to his or her friends?
For sites that do show an address they often don’t bother with their country and without that vital piece of information potential shoppers don’t know when they buy from a company based in say Cornwall if that is a company based in Cornwall UK or Cornwall Canada.
While a shop trading online may be prepared to ship anywhere in the world, some customers may prefer to buy more locally and if they have to spend time trying to guess where a company is located they can easily return to their favourite search engine and pick the next store in the list which does clearly display all relevant information.
The advice we give to our web hosting and design clients is not to be scared of letting potential clients know where they are located, having a real address can only help to build customer confidence and of course do include the country in the address.
