Mapping of online only / "no shopfront" businesses?

What is the policy for mapping businesses that don’t have a shopfront for customers to visit e.g. people that work from home, such as plumbers, painters, swimming pool builders etc, & who usually only advertise a phone number or website, but may also list their home address.

I was always under the impression that we didn’t map them at all, but just noticed this on the:
“The location of a business exclusively selling goods via online shopping is not tagged with shop=. Possibly company= may be more appropriate in such a case.”

Asking as we’ve recently had a rash of Notes being added to map these type of businesses, often linked to extremely dodgy looking websites, a lot of which appear to have been created by the same person, who’s made the same basic mistake on all of them - a mobile phone with either a country code r the leading 0, so it’s not going to work! :crazy_face:

Usually in these case when I’m mapping, I try to follow the on the ground rule (i.e. is the company publicly visible on the ground by means of a sign, etc.) For example, if an online-only retailer has an office, you could definitely map that as office=company and then add an appropriate value of company=* to specify it is an online retailer (the most common value I found on taginfro was company=online_shop, but IMO a value like company=e-commerce may be better)

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I’d say the same, as long as these craftsmen work from their home adress without having any business adress. If they have one I would map these kind of business as craft=*.

If the kind of business is not a craft but an online shop selling goods without any “shopfront” business I would also refrain from mapping these, unless there is some physical presence at the given address like a signboard or such. In this case I would map the shop as office=* without taking the derouting via office=company + company=* (which is discouraged in the wiki anyhow).

Existing tags for these kind of shops:

office=online_shop
office=Online_shop
office=online-shop
office=online_store
office=online_dealer
office=internet_shop
office=e_commerce
office=webshop

but also

company=online_shop
company=internet_shop
company=webshop

So feel free to make your choice … :wink:

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I guess that “possibly” should be clarified that on the ground requirement still applies to such office=company?

So signed internal office of online company can be signed as office (not as shop).

Unmarked company office unknown to locals is not mappable at all (and is often just a drawer in someone’s flat where they keep documents for their tiny shop).

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I edited wiki page, feel free to revert if further discussion is needed.

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An easy way that I use to tell if this sort of POI is SEO-motivated and inaccurate is opening_hours values. I often see opening_hours=24/7 added to residential home, which is a strong indicator that this was a drive-by SEO edit and not a good faith contribution.

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