Forum Moderators: anallawalla & bakedjake
The business I'm working with has a main office, but customers are not served at the office. The actual business is conducted at 45 separate brick & mortar pickup kiosks, none of which have telephones. Some don't even have true street addresses (so they can't get Google postcards).
The main office shows up two or three times in most IYP's (the current address, and an old satellite office closed a few years ago that once had a phone). But the kiosk locations are unknown.
The $12/month for a single line YP listing is more money than I can spend on an experiment that won't yeild results for at least a year (if ever). Any ideas?
That's a tricky one. I have no idea how to get around it but I would urge you to think from the data providers point of view. Sorry if this sounds negative, it's just my take on the situation.
Are these Kiosks owned by you? If $12 per year for each listing is too much then I would imagine that the kiosks have another purpose and have agreed to take on your service.
If they are providing multiple services the it would seem strange to list the kiosk as a separate business for all of those services.
I have direct experience with this type of scenario from a retailing point of view. I used to manage electrical retail stores and one that I run was a 'concession' (that is a store within a store), this had it's own listing in the Yellow Pages and Phone Book. I would imagine that if we were merely a department within the same store we would not have been able to get the listing. We had a rental agreement in place with the store and it was clear that we were trading as a different company than the main store.
I know it's not the answer you want to hear but I imagine that department stores have just one listing. So your kiosks will get only one, if any.
I would look into how other Kiosk based businesses handle the situation, try finding kiosks that you know of in the YP and other sources. If you can find one listed and they do not compete with your service then phone them and ask how they got their listings. It's amazing how helpful people can be if you find the right person and you are not a threat.
The locations are all subleases, not so different from your in-store locations. They are more akin to a FedEx drop box, a CitiBank location that's inside a supermarket, or a McDonald's inside a WalMart. Physically they are at least 10 feet x 15 feet and often larger.
You could make them aware that $7K is too much for your yound enterprise but next year you may be in a position to pay that kind of money, also letting them know that there will be less chance of that happening if you don't get the free listings.
