Contact Us / Don't Contact Us

Most of this article consists of suggestions, but this is a personal appeal: Please include contact information on your Web site, and please don't bury it where no one can find it. Online forms are fine, but they are no substitute for an email address. Would you do business with a company that refuses to give out its address, or even its phone number? If you want to shop on the Web, you may have little choice. Very few sites publish the office address of their business, and many have no contact information of any kind! Why not? What are these guys afraid of?

There are two reasons why a company may choose not to include proper contact info on their site (not counting simple laziness or stupidity). First, because they fear receiving a flood of "business-to-business" communications (in other words, sales calls). Second, because they want to reduce their administrative burden by forcing people to contact them only in ways that make it easy for them to process inquiries.

Even now that Web shopping is becoming more mainstream, most Web sites probably get more visits from other Web business people who want to sell them things than they do from potential customers. Yes, if you publish your phone number on the Web, you'll get calls from salesmen. The same drawback applies to publishing your phone number in the Yellow Pages, and if you consider this a problem, then what in the world are you doing in business? Who ever heard of a business with an unlisted phone number? Anyway, the salesmen will find you no matter what you do, so trying to hide from them only harms your business, not theirs.

The second reason that some businesses erect barriers between themselves and their customers is because they want to receive inquiries only in a specified form, thus making them easier to process. When someone inquires about your product, there may be certain information that you need from them. For example, an online travel agency may get an email asking for "information about flights to Paris." Without knowing where the customer wants to fly from, and when, there's nothing the travel agent can do with this request, so they are forced to respond asking for the additional info. If they put a form on their site that includes fields for departure city and dates, then they can process inquiries much more quickly and efficiently, if site visitors fill in the forms the way they are asked to.

However, many visitors will not play by your arbitrary rules. Some will simply omit the requested information. If you make these required fields, some will decide that using the form is too much trouble and will click away to your competitor. Some benighted souls even have old browsers that don't support forms at all, so you have zero chance of making contact with them. Do you really want to turn away potential customers? Companies with good customer service respond to all inquiries, not just those that are convenient for them to respond to.

I've probably ranted enough about this pet peeve, so let me summarize as follows: Use forms if you like, but also include an email address, a phone number and your street address in your "Contact" section. Want to really impress people with the fact that you're an established, reputable company who stands behind what they sell? Put this information right at the top of your home page.

It is unfortunately true that Spam is a heavy burden for online businesses. It's also demonstrably true that the more accessible you make your email address, the more Spam you'll get (of course, you'll get more legitimate inquiries too). To hide your email address away, however, would seem to be giving in to terrorist Spammers while shooting yourself in the foot to spite your ankle (or something). One possible compromise is to have a submission form, with a non-clickable email address listed on the same page.

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