Tell Your Customers Who and Where You Are

No one likes to give money to strangers. This is why personal relationships are so important in so many sales-oriented fields, and why the expression, "Would you buy a used car from this man?" has become part of our lexicon. The implication here is that you would not buy a used car from someone you perceive as untrustworthy. It is important, when making an ecommerce Web site, to ask yourself at every step of the way, "Would I buy so much as a door knob from this company?"

There are certain very basic confidence-building ingredients that every ecommerce site should contain, but surprisingly few do:

• Full street address, including city, state or province, country, and postal code.

• Telephone and fax number.

• Hours of operation, including time zone.

• At least one picture of the company's physical place of business.

• Pictures (preferably) or at least brief biographies of the company's founders, principals, and key employees (on a separate "About Us" page; in keeping with the information layering concept, we want this information available, but do not want to ram it down the throat of every site visitor every time he or she visits our main page).

By including this information, we humanize our company in the eyes of our potential customers. It is no longer just a Web site run by a faceless company or individual, but is run by people.

If your company is large, you can impress potential customers with the breadth of resources it offers. If it is an old-line company, you can call upon your proud history to instill confidence. If you are going into a new venture, you can speak of how you need every customer and want to give great service so that you can grow. If you are a solo entrepreneur or just have a few co-workers, you can make a virtue of personalized service. If you have a tiny, cluttered shipping area, you can post a picture of it and boast about how you save your customers money by not investing in frills, and if you have an impressive warehouse or own retail stores, you can use photos of them to convey an impression of substance.

Whatever you do, be honest. Put the best face on who and what you are. Don't pretend that you and your partner, working from a garage in one of your homes, are really a multinational corporation with thousands of employees, and if your company is a multinational corporation with thousands of employees, don't pretend that you can offer service as personalized as two people working from a garage. Some potential customers are going to prefer dealing with a huge organization while others would rather deal with small entrepreneurs. Trying to pretend you are what you are not is not only dishonest, but also probably won't get you any more business than telling the truth.

Your "About Us" section is the one and only place on your site where you should display ego, and lots of it. If at all possible, have each employee whose face or bio is on your site write his or her own copy. Possibly a professional writer could do a slicker job, but then the individual personalities would be lost, and the whole point of this site section is to give the whole thing personality. It's a good idea to get a pro to look over your copy and correct obvious spelling and grammatical errors, and perhaps smooth out the statements a bit if they need it, but the essence of each person featured must come through.

There is no reason to confine bios to executives, either. Why not include at least a few customer service, shipping, and other front-line people? To your customers, if not to investors, they are the company.