From time to time we receive requests from chambers to list their members in the Business Directory in alphabetical order; a feature that is available in ChamberMaster and is enabled by making a special request to ChamberMaster’s support team.

However, while this seems like a logical request at first, it is something we do not recommend. Before making the decision it is important to be aware of the reasons behind listing members in a random order in their category listing. Random listings provide complete fairness to all members, regardless of their name. Statistics of how consumers use the business directory show that most clicks on members’ names occur with the first three listings in any given category listing. This is true of Google as well and is the reason top placement in Google listings is so valuable. An alphabetical listing would provide a huge advantage to members whose name starts with a letter at the beginning of the alphabet while putting those with names further down the list would mean they are rarely seen, especially in longer listings.

For example, if someone goes to your website looking for a real estate company and selects the Real Estate category in the Business Directory, “Century 21” would always appear near the top while “Re/Max” will be much further down the list and because there are usually many real estate companies, there is a good chance that “Re/Max” would rarely be seen in an alphabetical listing. This would result in “Century 21” receiving most of the clicks and therefore most of the referrals from their Business Directory listing while “Re/Max” would receive little if any referrals; something that they probably will not appreciate. With a random listing, all the real estate companies would rotate their placements in various positions within the real estate category listing and provide a much more fair benefit to all members.

An argument that can be made for alphabetical listings is that a consumer may be looking for a specific company and already know the name of the member they are looking for. Certainly, searching through a randomly sorted list would make it much more difficult to find them. To address this we have an alphabetical option on the Business Directory search page that allows them to select a listing of members by the first letter of their name instead. Therefore, someone searching for “Pizza Hut” could click directly on the ‘P’ and would receive a listing of members starting with the letter ‘P’, in alphabetical order, making them easy to find.

This functionality resulted from focus group meetings during the design phase of the online Business Directory. However, if after understanding the benefits of a random listing within categories and the fact that we already provide an alphabetical search option, you still desire to turn on alphabetical lists within the categories, please send your request to support@chambermaster.com .