By law, to advertise commercial goods or services using any name other than your own as an individual, you must register that name using any one of a number of government mandated registration methods. Most commonly this is done by filing an Assumed Name Certificate or a Doing Business As (DBA) registration, usually through your County registrar's office. Other methods include registering a Trademark, or filing Letters of Incorporation as a corporation or as an LLC. Any one of these registration instruments will give you the legal authority to operate a business under an assumed, or business name and do things such as accept money, open a business checking account, or market your products or services. These documents are required by law to provide links between the assumed name and the business owners for matters of taxation and legal liability.
Often, especially online, people will operate using a business name that has not been legally registered leaving virtually no traceable information in case of problems and issues or fraud and theft. Fraud artists will often hide behind these unregistered business names and change them once they have been uncovered or will operate under multiple unregistered businesses at once.
As a business concerned with fraud and theft issues in our communities, we have implemented a registered business program so that you can be assured when dealing with people advertising as businesses on our site, that they have at least legally registered as a business in their jurisdiction. On May 1, 2007 this system became mandatory for anyone wishing to advertise using a business name on our systems. This included classifieds, sponsorships, banners, hosting and all other advertising. This is required at the time of classified account registration prior to posting advertisements, as well as purchasing other advertising services.
Let's use as an example a fictional person named Bob Johnson. Bob has some geckos and supplies he wants to sell on our site, but he is not sure if he needs to be a Registered Business. We asked our legal department to tell us what Bob needs to do to sell his geckos and this is how they broke it down for us.
* In the case that Bob has legally registered Bob Johnson's Geckos by filing a DBA, he may choose to register it with us as well to get the registered business button, but it will not be required.
We have waited to implement this system until a good percentage of states made their business registration information available online, having started development work on it in 2005. For most of you, locating your information online and sending a link to it to our Account Review team will be all that is required. In some instances where the documentation is not available online, we will be accepting the documentation by fax. The following forms of documentation will be accepted as proof of legal business registration.
There is no extra charge or fee associated with this service, but only active classified account holders may register, and only if they can document their legal business registration information.
To search for your information online, we suggest that you use Google to locate your County's web site and see if the information is available online. If your business information is unavailable online, we can accept scanned or photographed business registration information by email.
Once you have located your information online, contact our Account Review Staff and send them the link to your information. Once the registration has been approved, the button will automatically appear in your advertisements.
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