I saw a post on the Miva Merchant forum today that addressed the fact that many people still feel its ok to use their personal emails for business purposes. I couldn’t agree more that this is a huge problem, and if you fall into this category, read on.
Many business owners that start out small or on Ebay started their business using emails like businessname@aol.com, businessname@yahoo.com or something similar. Reasons they started out like this range from not having a budget for a domain and hosting to just not knowing any better.
HOWEVER, I still see business owners that have websites, and in some cases nice websites, that for some reason, stay attached to their old hotmail, yahoo or aol email accounts. Why they would do this is beyond me, but here are the problems.
- Professionalism
If you were your customer, would you want your sales or customer service questions answered by happytimehats@yahoo.com? Think about it. You place an order on Target’s online store, and you get emails from order@target.com. People shop with big online retailers all the time, so if you want to hang with the big boys, you should present yourself like one. Using CoolDude98@hotmail.com as your email address in a business setting isn’t going to accomplish that.
- Delivery Problems
We see it all the time, where we try to send an email to one of our clients (or vice verse) and our servers will not communicate with Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail or so on, because they block other email providers at the wholesale level. Meaning these “free” email providers are forced to do STUPID things to their email servers to prevent abuse, making you, their account holder look like a tool. Think about it, your customer places an order and their email address is TomJones@hotmail.com. Your using your AwsomeBusiness@Yahoo.com email address to send their shipment tracking number, but unknown by you, your customers ISP, Hotmail, dumps it into their SPAM box, and they never receive it. Your customer then gets cold feet because they haven’t heard back, and tries to cancel their order, or even worse does a chargeback. Awsome scenario eh? The same thing goes the other way around as well. You’d be surprised how many leads or follow up emails you’re missing because Yahoo dumps EVERYTHING into the SPAM folder.
I could go on, but won’t waste my breath. DON’T use personal or free email services to send business emails, especially if you run an online store. Get over the fact that you’ve had that Gmail account for 5 years now, and you’ve used it on Ebay for the last 4. Get yourself a domain name, hosting account and use a true business-like email address.
Thanks to Bruce @ Phosphor Media for bringing up this topic.
Ted Hust is the President of Aarc Media Group LLC which owns and operates AarcMediaGroup.com, BonitaJ.com and LaxFactor.com. Ted has been working in the web design world for 13 years and has specialized in Miva Merchant design and development for over 10 years.
People who are used to the gmail interface can even continue to use it via it’s POP3 settings with their new, more professional email address.
Unfortunately, a large number of online store owners are pros in their niche, but not tech people, so they miss a lot of important details like this. They’ve also been programmed to think the Internet is free or cheap, so they don’t invest much in their online stores, including getting the tech help they need.
To me, using a hotmail or yahoo email address for business is like having a hand-drawn sign outside a retail store.
…more like a hand-drawn sign, written in crayon
I can understand the behavior and the lack of understanding overall, but what boggles my mind is when someone has a domain, hosting and on top of it all a killer website, yet they still use that surfboardking99@yahoo.com email.
I know one of the big hangups is ties into the fact that many people either aren’t savvy enough to hook up Outlook, Outlook Express or Thunderbird locally on their computers (even though we’d walk them through that process for free as part of their hosting support if they hosted with us).
Another thing is that they REALLY, don’t like the average webmail systems that come with most hosting accounts. We offer both Horde, SquirrelMail and another one that is slipping my mind at the moment free with all hosting accounts, but honestly, their interface can’t compete with the FREE email systems out there that are ad based like Yahoo, Gmail and those others.
So I was overly critical in my rant, but if any store owner reads this and still doesn’t change their evil ways….shame on them.