Ebizbraintrust.com

When you walk into a place of business, how much do you value appearance and presentation? Appearance isn’t everything, of course, but you’d probably have some second thoughts if the receptionist was sitting at a collapsible picnic table in a room furnished with folding lawn chairs. The public face that a business presents goes a long way toward building the first elements of consumer trust.

Business web sites aren’t any different. They need to have “furniture” too. Unfortunately, in all of the rush and fuss associated with getting a new E-commerce site off the ground, much of the proper site furniture sometimes can be overlooked - or at least left until the last moment and then thrown onto the site hastily and without much thought.

Here’s a short checklist of important bits of furniture that every site needs to include:

1. Contact information. Your site should share your business contact information in as many places as possible. In order to avoid spam, email contact should be limited to a programmed contact form - but your business’ phone and address info should appear somewhere on every page of the site.

Obviously, people can’t do business with you if they can’t contact you. It baffles me that many businesses want to restrict contact information to an email contact form and nothing more. Their main fear is that publishing their phone number on the Internet somehow invites more abuse than publishing the same number in the phone book.

Why on Earth would you want to hide contact info from people who want to do business with you? Your business web site isn’t a super-hero and you don’t need a secret identity. Openess with your website customers helps breed the trust that’s so critical to online business.

2. Detailed “About Us”. This element works closely with the prominent display of your contact information. Customers want to know why they should do business with you - how will you solve their problems? - and this is where you tell them. Remember that your web site is available even when you’re not, so the information you give to your site visitors needs to present your business’ best ‘face’.

3. Clear data privacy policy. Give your site’s data-handling policy a prominent display in the site navigation (don’t hide some tiny link in the footer) and explain clearly to your customers what you do with their contact information. If your site generates lead for third-party clients, tell your site visitors. If you will only be using their contact information for your own business, tell them that too. Most importantly, whatever policies you state - make certain that you strictly abide by them.

4. Prominent terms of use and refund policies. This applies primarily to E-commerce sites. Be up-front with your potential customers about how you expect to do business with them and what they can expect from you when there is a problem with their order. Site visitors are aware that you likely aren’t perfect - but they also like to know that you’re prepared to deal with the imperfections when they occur.

Tags: E-Commerce, Online Business

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 at 10:05 am and is filed under E-Commerce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.