Marque opened this issue on Jan 07, 2005 ยท 16 posts
impish posted Fri, 07 January 2005 at 10:34 AM
I've bitten my tongue about this before when its come up but I'm going to have a little rant today ;-) I like e-on. I've spent a fair bit of money on their products. I expect to spend even more soon. However the no email thing irritates me. I understand spam can be a problem but their approach isn't a good solution. More importantly its not good practice. This doesn't just apply to e-on. A lot of companies are failing to follow good practice on their web sites. Its not just my opinion that its not good practice though, consumer protection law in the UK and rest of the European Union actually requires certain things to be on the home page of anyone who is selling onlines or promoting products or services on their web site. One thing is the companies address and the other is the companies e-mail address. Several guides to buying online (such as those from the Trading Standards here in the UK) advise consumers not to buy from mail order or online stores that don't have this information on their home page or who use PO Boxes. This is because companies that don't are more likely to be scams or commit fraud. I don't think e-on are about to commit fraud but a consumer who had read advice on buying online and who follows it wouldn't buy from them. I also realise that they are based in the US and I don't know what the US attitude/law/advice on this is. However given that recently some countries have said that they considers any web site viewable in their country to be bound by their laws and other countries have ruled that if you will sell to a resident of their country you are bound by their laws that may be a moot point. Still last time I saw a report on this of 100 major commercial web sites trading in the UK over 50% failed to meet these two simple requirements.