3 ms·
Picking a small online business in the UK, I can verify their company number with Companies House, verify that the street address listed is the same as the one
by YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
Picking a small online business in the UK, I can verify their company number with Companies House, verify that the street address listed is the same as the one on that registration and that the Nature of Business of the registration matches what I would expect for said business. I know that they were founded around ten years ago. I can then use Google Street View to look at the building they operate out of, and see the name of the business printed on the side. I can see that they have Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok and Instagram accounts, and that they own the .co.uk DNS entry for their company name. I can see that those social media accounts have followers and that they interact with customers on them. I know the full name of their director. I also know that they have a landline telephone number, and that telephone number has an area code appropriate for their street address, and that it's registered under their name in the telephone directory. Their website links to their Trustpilot listing, and that they're verified on Trustpilot. This communicates that they have some kind of a reputation, and it would be very costly for them to throw away all of those accounts and registrations should they want to throw away said reputation.
Compare that with that string of garbled pinyin: it returns zero google results, refers to an area of China with no Street View access, and I wouldn't even know where to begin to verify if they are actually a registered company, who owns that address or how long the company has existed, and there's nothing I could cross-reference with other sources. If they wanted to throw away that identity, they could probably get a dozen like it in under a week with minimal effort. So yes, there's definitely many ways they could be more open or informative to communicate their status as a legitimate business that values their identity.