If you plan to sell any products or services on the internet then it’s important to show that you are a legitimate business. You may have noticed that I have a ‘Privacy’ page here at The Marketers Geek and included on the privacy page is my full name, address and an email address I can be contacted on.

What prompted me to write this post was another website I was visiting. At the very bottom of the website it had the words ‘<sitename> is a legitimate online business’. I’ve left out the real name of the site, but it did have their sitename in there. This immediately rang some alarm bells for me. It may well be a legitimate business but a one line statement like that seemed a little odd. Looking further, the site provided no address, no name of a real person and to top it all off when I checked the domain whois information I found that the domain was registered with a domain ‘privacy’ service.

A lot of domain registrants advertise domain privacy services as a protection of your privacy but in my opinion if a business uses one of these services it tells me that they have something to hide. In the offline world your shop wouldn’t last long if you were secretive about your business name and refused to tell anyone who the business owner was. I suspect you would also be breaking some trade practises laws as well.

The basic message here is that if you want to run a legitimate online business then it’s essential that you provide information such as your business address and a point of contact (which could be an email address and/or telephone). If visitors to your website are going to spend money then they’re much more likely to go ahead and spend money if they know that your business has a real owner and a real address.

You can even take it a step further by using a verification service such as Trust Guard. It’s not necessary to use a service like that on all sites, but I use their service on my primary business sites such as Dedicated Server Doctor (scroll to the bottom of the page to see the trust guard seals).