Having a website business offers plenty of advantages over a brick-and-mortar business. You can essentially automate many business functions, you can choose your hours on a flexible schedule that suits your lifestyle and not have the overhead of property leases and so forth.

One of the main reasons you are in business is to make money. Success comes when you give good service and stand behind your promises to customers. You have to work a bit harder to gain your customers’ trust and establish your credibility as an honest, ethical marketer because with this business your customers don’t meet you face to face.

Developing good advertising ethics requires that you generally adopt that time honored adage, ‘the customer’s always right’. Anyone who has worked with the public knows that dissatisfied customers may be unreasonable, but if you treat them with respect and treat them fairly, they’ll return.

For instance, if you advertise your product with a money back guarantee, you have to be prepared to keep that promise. There are a few people who might take advantage of that offer.

Let’s say you put up a page on your site, making an offer good through a certain date. You mistype the date, and your customer is misled, believing it’s good for an additional period of time. It’s your mistake. Even if you discover the error after publishing, good advertising ethics requires that you allow the extended time period. Why? If you modify the page to correct the date, what happens when a previous visitor returns to make the purchase? You must honor the offer as published.

In a case like this, you can try to earn yourself a few PR points and turn it to your advantage. You could insert a note, right above the offer, to let your customers know you goofed, but are still going to honor the offer. You may even gain more sales, because your visitors have mentally calculated that your advertising ethics must be pretty trustworthy. You didn’t have to honor it, but you did.

Visitors can spread the word about your good advertising ethics making them walking advertisements, an unhappy and a happy customer alike.

Although we know there are some genuinely unscrupulous marketers out there, it doesn’t make much sense for a legitimate business person to not embrace a high standard of advertising ethics. It does a business good!

Article by Chris B, you can find more about him on his profile.