Why Do I Need A Contact Us Page On My Online Shop?

Contact Us pages are often the most visited pages of the entire website as new visitors are often curious about how they can contact the owners. Most Contact Us pages are the bare basic contact details but often these don’t inspire customers to make contact; You need to make it easy for people to contact you with an inviting Contact Us page. The best Contact Us page makes it easy for visitors to contact the company – you – and provides links to a range of resources that the visitors might be looking for.

Why do I need a Contact Us Page?

To provide a central place listing all of your available contact methods – you may have some contact details in the header or footer – which is good practice, however, it’s best practice to repeat all of your contact information in one central place.

What kind of content should be on the Contact Us Page?

Your trading hours – whether you’re online-only or not;
Links to your online shop’s social media profiles;
Contact telephone number – ideally not a mobile number;
If you have a physical shop too, embed a Google Map;
Live chat link – and details about when this will be manned;
Links to third-party review sites if you’re set up on the likes of Reviews.io, Trustpilot, or Google My Business, for example;
Email address or Contact Form – dependent on the size of your online shop – don’t forget to let the customers how long on average, it will take for them to receive a response if they contact you via email and who they will be hearing from.

Contact Forms

Contact Forms allow customers to submit a question or query to you without them having to log in to an email or social media account which is more convenient for the customer if they are using a shared computer;
Contact Forms let customers contact you without you revealing your email address, which is essential with larger businesses where lots of different email addresses have been set up to deal with complaints, queries and refunds separately;

A Contact Form forces a customer to provide specific details which may be omitted if the customer contacts you via different means – such as an email or a message or a comment on a social media platform. Don’t forget to ensure you have Captcha set up on the form so you don’t get lots of spam.

Larger online companies may want to provide a summary of FAQs, with links to the relevant pages on your online shop, such as:

Delivery Times;
Refunds and returns;
Information about loyalty schemes and customer accounts if you have these;
Current employment vacancies;
Contact details for different departments, such as Customer Service, Online Sales, etc.

Dos

Offer more than one way to contact you – some folks still enjoy speaking to people as opposed to sending emails or DMs on social media;
Be positive in your text, with ‘how can we help you today?’;
Double-check for mistakes in spelling, punctuation and grammar (Grammarly is free to use and has a Google Chrome extension which is very useful);
Make sure the design of your Contact Us page matches the rest of your online shop in terms of graphics and branding;
Use your brand’s personality in your text.

Don’ts

Have any superfluous content on the Contact Us page – everything on there should be for the singular reason of getting in contact – nothing else is required;
Use email forms to ask for unnecessary information – this is frustrating to many users and can put people off from contacting you;
Make it complicated or difficult for people to contact you, such as only answering calls for an hour a day, for example;
Have a text-only page – use graphics or pictures – such as a group photo of your team for example – to break up the information.

Make sure your Contact Us page is in a prominent place and can be accessed from anywhere on your online shop. It’s an important trust signal. Once the Contact Us page is live, you may want to use heat mapping like Hotjar to monitor which parts of the page are most interacted with and rearrange the page content to ensure that these commonly used aspects are front and centre.