Direct Diet Owner - Or how to find out more about a website

Sometimes, before spending any money on their products, we want to know from whom we buy. That applies especially when buying food and diet products. A lot of people buy those from Diet Direct and therefor I thought it might be a good idea to provide a bit of background information about the company. But I decided not only to post my findings as such, but also how I got there. This way you can do your own research in future and find out more about the online shops you plan to buy from, being it dietary supplements or others.

The first thing what I normally do, when doing basic internet research, is to look at the site itself and see what information is provided there. I look at the 'About Us', 'Our History', 'Our Team' sections as well as at the contact page. In the case of Diet Direct I could find out that, Diet Direct is a incorporated company, no personal owner is mentioned. Also the other information on the website explains only how to contact the company as such, not a particular person. From a marketing point of view, it would be great if they added a few photos of senior stuff and background information about them. But apart of this, all looks fine. A quick Google search with “Diet Direct, Inc.“ in quotation marks throws up a BBB (Better Business Bureau) report that is very positive, see more here. They are an BBB accredited business since 2005 and have an A+ rating. Nice, the highest ranking available. And here I found finally the name of the President / CEO, a man called John Thomas. A bit of googling around, I will not boring you with the exact results, shows that he is quite active on affiliate marketing forums, helping people to promote his products ;-)

The next thing I do is doing a simple who.is search. In case you don't know it, who.is is the database, publicly searchable and free, that provides you with background information about websites. You simple go to who.is and in the search bar you type in the url of the website you want to look up, in the case of my Diet Direct research, that looks then like this: http://who.is/whois/dietdirect.com/

As you can see, Diet Direct provides information about who they are and how they can be reached, both by telephone and email as well as via their postal address. This is a good sign in my books as I would be very reluctant to buy from somebody that hides behind a private registration. That is fine for bloggers or people that have pure information websites, but not for an online retailer. So, here we can see that Diet Direct is located in the USA, in Wilmington, North Carolina to be exact. But we can see a bit more, interesting is that the site is quite established, the domain was first registered to this owner in 2004, another good sign, showing that they have been around for a while. And by looking at the results in the 'Internet Time Machine' here: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://dietdirect.com I can see that the site was about buying dietary products online since at least 2005. Means again that they have been in that business for a while.

Obviously more research could be done, I could for example, put their address into Google Maps and see where they are located in the real world (see map on bottom of this hub for this) or I could even use Google Earth to 'fly' to their location. And I could Google the names I find in the who.is database and on the website itself to digg even deeper. Plus I could search if they have profiles on the main social media sites such as Twitter or Facebook (Here the Facebook page of John Thomas the President / CEO of Diet Direct. Now you can even send him a friend request ;-) You see, knowing a bit about internet research can give you a lot of information about a place you plan to buy your dietary supplements from ;-) And yes more could be done, but that would be a bit over the top, just to answer such a simple question as: Who owns Diet Direct. Answer: Diet Direct Inc. is an incorporated company, located in Wilmington, North Carolina, whose CEO / President is called John Thomas.