Vendor websites increasingly seem to be set up more to collect information about the customer than to provide information about the company's products. As one reader recently noted, just finding a way to ask a few questions about products before you buy can prove an impossible task. "Have you noticed that the Internet is growing holes - many of them deliberately put there?" the reader wrote. "Some time ago I not Vendor websites increasingly seem to be set up more to collect information about the customer than to provide information about the company’s products. As one reader recently noted, just finding a way to ask a few questions about products before you buy can prove an impossible task.“Have you noticed that the Internet is growing holes – many of them deliberately put there?” the reader wrote. “Some time ago I noticed that the larger the company, the less likely it would be that I would be able to get any contact information from their website. There would be forms to fill out that would capture all of my sellable information – but little way to actually talk to them. All of the telephone numbers would lead, if you took the time to navigate the tree, to the help desk. Those workers would be treated like mushrooms – and could not or would be instructed to not give the corporate headquarter telephone numbers to callers who asked for them. Lately, I have been noticing many companies, even those trying to sell Internet goods, with no contact e-mail addresses! If you call the phone number, you get the voice recorder. If you send an e-mail blindly to say ‘support@widget.com’, you get an automated email directing you back to the website that bumfuzzled you in the first place.”What brought this home to the reader was a recent experience he had researching online credit card processing outfits for his company. “We have a new product that we are thinking about distributing through the net, so I looked through several sites and created a list of questions that I then e-mailed, or at least attempted to e-mail, to 20 different credit card processing companies. Since most of the companies put a minimum of information on their fees on their websites, most of the questions relate to fees. Many companies had no actual email address. Instead they displayed a database information collection program with a small field for just one question. For those companies, I e-mailed info@vendorname.com to see if that would work. Some companies like websitepaymentsystems.com summarily rejected my email with a ‘no such person’ bounce. Others like paymentclearing.com sent me an automated response pointing me to their FAQ page on their website. Not good — automating the response to requests for info may be cost-effective, but it certainly isn’t going to win over potential customers who already failed to find the information they need on that website.” Some companies did respond to the reader’s request for information, but not always in a useful fashion. “Someone at Secpay.com sent me a nice automated e-mail stating that he was on vacation and would get back with me when he got back — is that TMI or not enough? Firstdata.com sent me their signature promising 24-hour support with no further response. Nabancard.com – North American Bancard, a major player — sent me a nice automated response saying that they were working on a response, but I guess the questions were too tough as I have not heard anything more. But I have had some fairly complete responses. One — Commercepaymentsystems.com — answered all the questions. Another used Internet chat to answer most of my questions and a third was a combination of look for it here combined with answers for questions that had no web page to point to. Based on my cursory first pass, though, those who responded are also among the most expensive. Is there a moral there?”Fifty percent of the companies the reader e-mailed did not respond to his query in any fashion, the reader says. “So I guess the phenomena that I am seeing is the usual poor customer service response added to internet incompetence and, possibly, a deliberate attempt to duck any questions whatsoever. Either the Internet has convinced the marketplace that its users are all cretins who can be fooled all the time or a very large group of merchants have decided to reveal that they believe their market niche is too stupid to shop around and ask questions.”Have you ever found yourself going the wrong direction on a one-way information superhighway? Post your comments about this column on my website or write me at Foster@gripe2ed.com. Read and post comments about this story here. Technology Industry