EU Directive on contact details for ecommerce websitesarticle

Yes, ‘the customer is king’ may be a cliché, but clichés become that precisely because they capture an essential truth. And in the world of ecommerce websites, you need to treat your customer like a king, or risk not only sales, but falling foul of the law.

Contactable & responsive

If your company is selling a service or a product online you need to be sure that your customers can get answers to their queries quickly and easily. Although you may think that you’re covered if you provide a toll-free phone line, open 24-hours a day, the reality is that you are still not complying with EU law if you don’t also provide a contact email address. A well-known low-cost airline was caught short and fined for failing to do so last month.

According to the EU Ecommerce Directive, all ecommerce websites must include at a minimum the following information:

• the name of the company
• its geographical address (A PO Box is not going to cut it.)
• an email address
• your company registration number, and where your company is registered, or alternatively the name of the proprietor
• your VAT registration number if you’re registered.

Although the directive does not stipulate that you need to have a phone number, it does stipulate that you provide an alternative means of being contacted ‘directly and effectively’.

And just providing all this information is not enough, you also need to be able to respond to queries and complaints within a reasonable time.

Answer questions before they're asked

For small and large companies alike, the risk of wasting precious resources in responding to apparently obvious queries is very real. This is what makes FAQs a valuable asset on your site. If carefully structured, easily accessible, and well written, they can take a great deal of pressure off your customer service team by limiting the number of queries you receive.

Make it obvious

And finally, don’t forget that all the required contact information must be ‘easily, directly and permanently accessible’ on your website. It can’t be hidden six clicks into your site and given an obscure page name. So, label the page clearly – ‘Contact Us’ or ‘Customer Service’, and preferably make it accessible from any page of your website, either by including it in your main navigation, or in the site-wide footer.