Internet marketing is a different ball game altogether when compared to traditional marketing. A brick and mortar store employs salespersons to guide and advise its customers. No such equivalent of a salesperson exists for an online store. This could be one of the reasons why people shy away from online stores.

Given these circumstances, it is of vital importance that your web store should be as interactive as possible. An interactive website makes your visitors feel more comfortable and increases your chances of making a sale. A well designed website is the first step to make your visitor comfortable. Enough has already been said about not choosing flashy colours or having excessive graphics. I will now elaborate on the importance of having a feedback form in your website.

Every site will invariably contain a "Contact Us" section. Information usually present in this section includes the business name, e-mail address, physical address, telephone numbers etc. But what is missing in many websites is a feedback form. Consider a scenario where your visitor has a query and wishes to contact you. If you don't have a feedback form, your visitor will most likely choose to e-mail you. There are numerous intervening steps that your visitor has to perform before he can e-mail. Such steps like opening his/her e-mail program, logging in etc. are distractions and your visitor's attention is easily diminished. Moreover if your potential client is on a public computer he/she may not have access to his/her e-mail and it is extremely unlikely that he will remember and contact you once he/she gets back to his/her computer.

All this can be avoided by having a simple feedback form in the "Contact Us" section of your website. Your visitor won't even be leaving your site when he/she fills up your form. The very nature of forms makes it easy for you to collect information from your visitor. For example, if your visitor requires more information about a particular product that you are selling, he/she can choose it from a drop-down box listing all your products and then type his/her query. Consider the alternative: if you didn't have a feedback form in your website, your visitor would have to type your product name in the e-mail and then type the query - more pain to your user.

The very fact that feedback forms have so many advantages may lead you to believe that they are very hard to implement. You would be surprised to know that they are one of the simplest things to have. Forms consist of very simple HTML and there are numerous tutorials available on the web for creating them. You also need a program/script to process the form and a simple query in your favourite search engine would find many such scripts. A simpler method would be to sign up for a remotely hosted form processing service so that all your form processing needs can be outsourced. You will find that the entire process takes about 10-15 minutes or lesser and you can have a feedback form up and running!

Now that I have shown you that it is so simple to have a feedback form and there are numerous advantages associated with it, there is no reason for you not to have one!