"Andrew Kidd" wrote in
news:4csCb.376396$275.1220511@attbi_s53:



"Scott Seidman" wrote in message
. 1.4...
SNIP
Personally, I won't do ANY e-business with anyone I couldn't contact
by phone if I needed to, EVER. I don't even know what country you
guys are in.

While most likely you're legit, sending a credit card number to the
nameless and faceless is a really stupid thing to do. Its a high
risk way to make a purchase. Even if I were in the market for a
fishing log, you wouldn't get my business.


I'm not attacking here, but I do have a different point of view....
While I agree that it is slightly more difficult to do business by
email, I have an online business and while 99.9% of our customers are
fine people we're happy to have for customers, I don't want to hand
that other .1% my home phone number (actually, my second phoneline).
My point being, not every business on the internet is run in a
dedicated office environment. We run our business from our homes, and
our website is our office. We still give our customers our best
service possible, everyday. Actually, several times a day!

I'm sure you do provide excellent customer service, but putting in a
dedicated phone line with an answering machine is a relatively small
expense that might attract customers. At least, your website provides an
address. The site in question here doesn't extend that courtesy. I
think we can both agree that when you give your credit card to someone,
you should at least know what business you're giving it to.

As for credit cards, you're only slightly more at risk over the
internet
then by handing it to the guy or gal at the restaurant who disappears
with it to charge your bill, or the folks at the hotel counter who
take an impression of your card for their records, or the folks who
take your order over the phone for catalogs, etc, etc, etc. God only
knows how many people have access to your card that you don't know at
all, and have never met...

When you deal with reputable online companies with good security
policies, you're probably safer than when you hand you're credit card to
a waiter. When you deal with small guys who don't know from security,
you're asking for trouble. I'm basing this on letters from my web-
hosting company that said they found many sites on their own servers that
were collecting card numbers on encrypted pages, and then mailing them or
storing them on unencrypted pages.


P.S. The site representitive is from Dublin, Ireland. This, and his
address and phone number, can be found through publicly accessible
information online. So, our customers could find our phone number if
they needed to.

With you're site, you're a corporation. People can find your Tax ID
number if they needed it, they can complain to your attorney generals
office or better business beaureau if they saw fit. You're not
anonymous. There remains something inherently wrong with doing business
with an anonymous party.

Scott