We recently sent a message to the W3 mailing list for 'public contacts', asking about what standards or guidelines were available to unify and standardize the contact information for internet retailers, as we noticed that there were significant variations in how websites would list their contact telephone numbers and email addresses - some opting to display them prominently on every page while other companies had them buried in some obscure back-pages that were not intuitively or easily accessible.
In reply, Michael Hanson from Mozilla Labs helpfully pointed out the hCard microformat as the type of standard we described. However, there were some areas that we would like to clarify, as our experience in the industry indicates that we could add to the microformat standards to increase the quality and richness of the data. For example, the hCard format allows for a contact telephone number, email address and similar contact points such as instant messenger handles. However, high street stores and internet retailers will often have multiple contact points, depending on the nature of the enquiry - such as a dedicated line for sales, another for customer service and maybe even more, for technical support - and it follows a similar pattern for email addresses. There are other variations in the type of information being searched for - in our research we found that web users were commonly searching for phrases such as 'Contact ABC-Company' and 'XYZ-Company Head Office'. The head quarters telephone number for a company is usually always different from the sales and customer support lines - we are not aware of any descriptive classes in the hCard format to signify this distinction. Users are also commonly searching for 'store opening times' and the nearest store for those chain companies that have physical premises nationwide. We are actively working with the product catalogues of some 500 internet retailers through our shopping search engine database at http://www.superstoresearch.com and we have access to thousands of more contacts in the shopping and retail industry - if we have some agreed and suitable standards for the various types of contact information, we could reach out to the internet retailers and put forward the suggestion that they adopt such standards and implement them on their e-commerce sites. The benefit of such an exercise would be that the availability of standardized contact information would lead to the emergence of useful services and applications that made it easier for consumers to connect with companies and brands, while making the companies much more easy to discover via the automated spider bots of such services. There is a hCard creator script: http://microformats.org/code/hcard/creator We could contribute to the project by dedicating some of our developer resources on scripting an adapted version of the hCard creator that was optimized for internet retail businesses - to help the implementation of these standards. However, before going forward with such an idea, we would need to know if there are any suitable classes to differentiate between different telephone numbers and email addresses (sales, customer service, technical, head office, switchboard/operator) and further how to list multiple addresses for a company (head office address, local chain store differentiated by zip/post code) and if there is scope to include 'store opening times' and for e-commerce sites: if they have a 'reserve & collect' service (where you can order online, but collect in store without having to wait for a delivery). We may ask internet stores to provide such store opening times and 'reserve & collect' availability, so it would be ideal if we could agree some standards before compiling such information. Best regards, Junaid Nazir SuperStoreSearch Team -------------------------- Merchant Support http://www.superstoresearch.com | Online Shopping Guide Email: junaid.na...@superstoresearch.com Phone: 0798 555 333 0 + + + + + SuperStoreSearch on Facebook & Twitter: http://www.facebook.com/SuperStoreSearch http://twitter.com/Guidester Buzz Shopping Blog: Interesting technology news, how to guides, tips and popular product comparisons & reviews. http://www.superstoresearch.com/buzz/ + + + + + _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss