I am always amazed at the number of “e-commerce” sites that forget the basics.
What are the basics?
If you want to sell online you need to give potential buyers some level of confidence.
There are a number of ways of reassuring potential buyers, but the simplest is providing proper contact details.
Providing an email address or a mobile number simply is not enough.
Someone recently recommended a DVD rental site to me, as they offered a good range of international films that would probably suit my taste.
Although I may like their range of films I am not going to give them any money.
Why not?
The contact details on their site do not inspire me with confidence.
I am not going to give somebody my credit card details or anything else based on a whim.
Am I atypical?
I don’t think so.
If you want to sell goods or services online you need to make sure that potential buyers feel happy that their monies and personal details are being given to a real person or company.
How hard can that be?
Hi Michele
What contact information would satisfy you?
For example my website doesn’t include a postal address or land line number, why?
Well I dont want people to think that I only service the Dublin region and with a blackberry and a laptop who needs to be stuck at a landline when I can be out of the office drumming up business 🙂
Fintan
You are not selling directly from your website. That is the key.
If you were I’d expect full contact details.
Michele
That makes more sense 🙂
Throwing the question back at you – would you buy online if there were no tangible contact details?
Depends on the company
Im a regular Amazon customer, after having a quick look at the website I cant eaily find any contact details apart from email.
But say it was some random site I stumbled across?
Contact details would be only one of the things I would consider, I would also look at the quality of the website itself, language used, terms and conditions and then I google the company to see if i can find any complaints on bulletin boards etc. I might also post on boards.ie or something asking if anybody had used them.
If it was an Irish company and I was still unsure I would also do a WHOIS on the site to see if I can get any more info and then do a search on the CRO website for account filings etc.
The last line of defence is cancelling the transaction on my credit card, which is more about trust in Visa than in any on-line business
But I have to go to all this effort to re-assure myself about buying from them, Im 99% sure I wouldn’t buy from the company.