is this legal - competitors pretending to be many companies

unwashed potato!

unwashed potato!

unwashed potato!

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one of my competitors have hundreds of websites, each with a different business name that's typically some variety of the town and service. e.g. woking gardeners, guildford gardeners, woking number 1 gardeners, angies fantastic gardeners. etc

they are all the same company. i know this for sure and it's frustrating, as customers will typically go to 2/3 companies so they will unknowingly approach the same company a few times, think they're getting a few quotes and then chose one, but it doesn't make a difference the end result is one company gets the work.

is this legal? what can i do if not? in my opinion it's a dirty trick. i'm ok for a company to have many websites, but to pretend to be different names is what i dislike and very hard to fight against.
 
Taxi company round my way does this, frustrating when you ring up a few places to get a price and you keep getting the same person. :mad:

No idea on the legalities but interested to find out.
 
I don't see why it would be illegal, unless they are trying to pass themselves off as someone else or using a trademark. Even 'Overclockers' is just a trading name, not the name of the actual company.

What about Currys, Dixons and PC World?
 
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It's perfectly legal, I do believe they have to put "ABC trading as XYZ", but I think that's done more to help consumers.
 
Confused.com owned by Admiral. Yes, that Admiral. They also own elephant.co.uk, Bell Direct and Diamond, the womens car insurance specialist, and Gladiator for commercial vehicle insurance.
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Fairly sure the answer is no said:
what about if it was proven that they do it to trick customers to believe they are getting quotes from 3 different companies?
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Are they fabricating their trading address anywhere?

I used to work for a company with an "international presence" but traded from a small office in the sticks. That was cloud computing/Web services rather than lawn mowers and hoes, mind
 
d_brennen said:
Are they fabricating their trading address anywhere?
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the trading address for the main name is central london, however they pretend to be based in towns in surrey and pretend that's the business name so that locals will use them as they expect the company to be locally based. when asked over their online chat, they say the company name is that which the website you're on, but won't give out their business address or company number.
 
NVP said:
Confused.com owned by Admiral. Yes, that Admiral. They also own elephant.co.uk, Bell Direct and Diamond, the womens car insurance specialist, and Gladiator for commercial vehicle insurance.
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Admiral isn't even the company name, it's a trading name of EUI Limited.
 
Fairly sure the answer is no said:
what about if it was proven that they do it to trick customers to believe they are getting quotes from 3 different companies?
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How will you prove that that is why they do it? How will you prove that it isn't some other reason? Good luck with that, because you'll need it.

What they're doing, like everything else in this country, is legal unless a law somewhere says it isn't. In this case, there may be many reasons for doing it.

For instance, the people answering the phone may be a central office operation, but the guys that turn up and do the work might be independent contractors paying a fee for common office services. So, each independent contractor can have his own website, and perhaps the success of his business depends on how extensively and successfully he markets himself.

But, what he's marketing is his brand name.

So, I set up as AlDav Gardening Services, using this office services company. After a bit, I take on three extra people, do a bit more marketing effort, leaflet drops, pay for more local paper adverts, build a better website, etc, and more work rolls in. So, I hire 6 more guys, meaning now there's 10 of us, and I expand to cover a couple of extra areas. After 5 years, there's 30 of us covering the whole county and now I decide I can justify three people on permanent office staff, because I can bring more admin services in-house, and stop paying for the phones to be answered, etc, by that office services company, and I hire someone in my office to do bookeeping, pay the weekly wages run, etc.

The last thing I want is to have to rebrand, because by now, AlDav Gardening is well-known, respected, successful and with a solid client base.

The reason, in my example, for many different 'brands' advertising is because it's many different people. But I could paint several different scenarios for using different brand names. Another would be targeting different market sectors, or different geographical areas, or even simply test-flying different names to see which, psychologically, people pick, or don't pick.

If I put out two sites simultaneously, one called AlDav gardening, and one called Glorious Gardens, which one gets the responses? Maybe AlDav because it starts with A and comes earlier in phone books, or maybe Glorious because it's more evocative of gardens. So I test out both and see what works.

As I say, good luck proving quite what motivates multiple sites. When you've finushed with that, I have an incoming tide you can order back. ;) :D

Is it legal? There are some steps that have to be taken in terms of accounting, HMRC, etc but on the surface, yes it is.
 
Aldav said:
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thanks for the reply. your example shows a legit reason for multiple businesses. they on the other hand don't have legit reasons like that, and do it solely to appear like many companies. i guess i have to accept it and try to fight back doing a similar thing.

it's just really annoying as if i for instance find one of their websites where the company name is Great Gardeners of Manchester. i google one sentence from their prices page and bam i've found 50 websites, each pretending to be from a different town so Great Gardeners of York****e, Great Gardeners of London etc 50 times over.

now i can go to find another of their websites now pretending to be a different company this time called Gardeners Manchester. It's a different phone number that's local to that town, and then google a line from this other website and once again another 50 websites under this different name + town each with a different phone number.

then again for other services they do, so oven cleaning. you have oven clean team + town. dream clean oven + town. town + oven cleaner. number 1 oven cleaner + town.

checking the website, they all were registered pretty much on the same day and all recently.
 
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