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.
I agree with you on having a contact form, email address, but having phone numbers you really are talking about a corporate type directory/website. Us small directory owners can not, will not post phone numbers or any other personal info on our sites in fear of unsavory persons calling…
You have to have a business number and or other which small sites don’t have. So in effect you are saying to us small sites that you will never get listed here because your not a business!!! :-/
We have many small business sites submitted each and every day who choose to clearly display their full contact methods.
This rule is not done to be awkward, this is done because we are sick and tired of dealing with other peoples messes where someone else’s frustrated customer asks us to resolve their problem, obviously there’s nothing we can do to help. All we can do is delete the listing to avoid sending another visitor there and landing them in the same predicament.
An example would be that with web directories we’ve listed people have contacted us after they have submitted to them asking us what’s going on with their paid submission as after a couple of weeks they’ve heard nothing and the contact form isn’t working. All they can do is a PayPal dispute or chargeback, when if they could have talked with the site operators it may have been a simple easily resolved problem.
Our aim is to provide people with good quality sites where they can communicate easily with the vendor, we want people to use the listings and come back to find other relevant sites, if they avoid the directory then there’s no point having it.
As it happens, in the UK those trading online are obliged to clearly display their contact information.
However at the end of the day if sites choose not to display the three contact methods then that’s their choice and they can submit to one of the many other directories that don’t have this requirement.