Personal details on site

[peterB]

Hi there, I have nearly completed a site for a customer who works from home and is making the transition from e-bay to an Actinic Solution, she has some concerns regarding her contact details being shown on the Information section of Actinic, ie home address, telephone number, I know on e-bay these are only available when an item is purchased.

Does anyone here work from home or is she being over cautious....

Regards
Peter.

[chris ashdown]

I work from home and feel it makes no difference.

At the end of the day who knows whats a work address or a company workplace.

The only thing I would recommend is a seperate phone line so you know how to answer each one. and whatever you do do not use a mobile number as it will scare the pants off most buyers

[I-CC]

When operating your own sales site you have to show contact details clearly to shoppers, which means that they have to be visible without actually having to make a purchase and for if they need to go back to the site to get contact details about after sales or support on what they have purchased, so you must show this information clearly on the site, so put the info online.

Like was advised, get a 2nd telephone/fax line so that you can answer it in the trading name, and also so that you can switch it off at the end of the day (ringer off), so that you are not fielding calls at midnight which as few of our customers found out to their cost in late nights

[Jan]

If she is concerned then she could set up a P.O.Box number quite easily.

Regards,

[peterB]

Thanks to you all for the input, some good ideas there to put to my client.

Regards
Peter.

[Miranda]

I live in a relatively long sparsely populated rural road with just house names, and after a couple of months and a few chats with the postie, I actually dropped the house name as the business address and just have the company name, road etc. Which actually is what most if not all my neigbours do with their businesses.
Is this something your customer can do?

This is quite handy for us as we get a lot of 'on spec' callers thinking we're a shop, many of whom spot us under baby goods in the YP and think we will sell prams and high chairs (quite why they think a shop is down here when its a rural cul de sac...), and I get a lot of calls from mobiles saying 'I can't find your shop...'. The funniest was the lady who wanted to buy some menstrual pads, had seen them on the site and decided to call in (without phoning) the next day (Saturday) . Poor lady had to ask virtually every house till she remembered I also sold nappies (which my neighbours know), when she got here she was greeted by my DH who knows nothing about menstrual pads (obviously) Not sure who was the most embarassed!
We're moving to proper premises shortly.

[chris ashdown]

Not so shure of your PO box sugestion Jan, Might make the site look a bit dodgy

[OldWelshGuy]

Under the business disclosure regulations you MUST display legal ownership, together with a place where documents can be served. This must be displayed on every point of contact with clients. A web site is no different. Many people choose to ignore this, but they are leaving themselves open to a fine, and bad publicity.

[kathynewman]

We work from home and have had a PO Box for 4 years and don't feel it's had a bad effect on the business. We publish PO Box address, email, telephone number and fax number. It's very easy to find the real address behind a PO Box should anyone want to. Only time PO Box can be a problem is for deliveries from couriers - they don't do it - so to most of our suppliers we give our real address. PO Box really is just to deter visitors to our house - a lot of people call us to see if they can collect items - and we have to explain we're not a physical shop - and we can't have callers here.

I would certainly recommend a different telephone/fax number - couldn't run our business without both of these.

Kathy

[chris ashdown]

It would be nice if we had some way of having a survey with the Question

"Would you buy from a PO Box Number address"

[Mike Hughes]

The ecommerce directive which is UK law does specify that a geographic address for the business must be specifed (a PO box is not sufficient).

(b) the geographic address at which the service provider is established;

You can read the whole thing here:

http://www.legislation.hmso.gov.uk/s...2/20022013.htm

or a summary of various bits of stuff here:

http://www.site-report.com/ecommerce_regulations.php

Mike

[kathynewman]

Thanks Mike - makes interesting reading - wonder if we could have our PO Box as our correspondance address and our real address as our "registered" address - as I said previously the only reason we don't give our real address is we can not have visitors here.

Few other interesting rules - one of which all of us who are using Actinic break

Ensuring that your shopping cart does not make the following common mistakes:

Force the user to view the cart after each added item

Actinic does this!

There are so many websites out there breaking lots of these rules - others it listed include:

Use a ‘Buy Now’ button instead of a ‘Add to Cart’ button
Make the user register before adding items to a cart (a personal hate of mine!)

Kathy

[kathynewman]

Just done a bit more reading - my last post was having read the summary Mike posted (http://www.site-report.com/ecommerce_regulations.php) which mentions things like no po box and the add to cart rather than buy now stuff.

However having read more on http://www.legislation.hmso.gov.uk/...02/20022013.htm

I can see no mention at all of not using a PO Box - it refers to Geographical Address - but does not give a definition of what a Geographical Location is - I shall give them a call later to find out!

[Mike Hughes]

Hi Kathy,

The bits you referred to were all under the heading:

In addition to ensuring that you satisfy the ecommerce regulations, you can gain extra credibility by:

i.e. these aren't covered by regulations but are just recommendations by the site owners.

Mike

[OldWelshGuy]

The term 'geographic address' means an actual physical address at which documents can be served. You can not serve documents at a PO Box.