LocalHand FAQ

Very simply LocalHand is a classifieds service with ratings and reviews - because reputation matters.

For a buyer, find a service (e.g. plumber, teacher, mechanic), read ratings and reviews from your friends and others in your community that you trust and contact the seller.

For a seller, attract more business by listing your service and capturing customers' recommendations online. Give good service, get good reviews and let customers know about your good service. LocalHand is the cheapest way to provide word of mouth advertising to your business.

We want to make doing business with a small company or an individual very transparent. You should know if you can trust who you are dealing with. And what better way to do so than listening to your friends and others who have dealt with that business or individual.

There are three main things about LocalHand.

1) List: List services that you want to sell. Consider LocalHand as an eBay for selling your services. Are you a mechanic, contractor, plumber, electrician, painter, cleaner? Are you someone who can teach or tutor music, piano, painting, math, English? Are you a small business that is looking to grow? Then, LocalHand can help you. List your services and build your reputation.

2) Search: Are you looking for a service and don't know who to trust or where to get it from? LocalHand, provides ratings and reviews on many services. Real reviews from your friends and others in your community. No need to send an email blast to all your friends asking for a recommendation for a cleaner. Just go to www.localhand.co.uk and search.

3) Rate and Review: Did you like the work the gardener did? Or do you want to make sure your friends don't use the cleaner because they did not a good job. Rate or review them and help your friends and your community.

The best way to trust a service provider is if you have first hand experience with the service provider. If you don't, you can trust LocalHand to gather experiences of your friends and real users to help you decide which service provider you should use. We want to provide you with objective, real reviews and ratings of service providers so that you can make your decision whether to use them or not. It also creates a secondary benefit in that the service provider has an incentive to provide good service.

The ratings and reviews allow real users to give their opinions and thoughts about service providers. You need to be a registered member of LocalHand to give your ratings and reviews Once registered, you can review any service provider that you have worked with.

The only way your family, friends, neighbors and others can make the right choice about service providers is if you and others like you who have experience with that service providers rate them. Think about this as a circle of trust – you help out others by rating service providers, they help you out by rating service providers. By rating service providers, you also create a strong feedback mechanism for the seller and improve service levels. Finally, by rating service providers, you are allowing an individual or a small company to compete more effectively with the “big guys? because now the small guy has reputation and trust.

You can use the search box and type the name of the service and highlight the region you are in. It is simple as that.

Nothing. LocalHand is provided free of cost to buyers. Sellers can list services for free and pay for using premium features. We will also be providing advertisement features in the future.

No, Absolutely not. We want to provide a trusted service and our pledge to you is that we will never share your information with any one else. You will only receive communication from us and will have the option of opting out from our communications whenever you want.

You can search for listings without signing up. To post listings to the LocalHand site and to rate and review, you will have to register.

To list a service, click on the "List a service" at the top of any page or after logging into your account. Once on the listing page, please make sure to fill all the information that is asked. The more information that you fill in, the higher your chances of getting hits.

To rate and review someone, simply click on the "Find and rate users" link at the top of the page and give your views about the service provider. Alternatively, you can follow the link from someone's listing to review them.

The reviews on LocalHand are from real users like yourself. We have a very active fraud prevention mechanism to weed out spam reviews. If you think that there is a spam review, please do tell us. It is critical for us to maintain the objectivity of the reviews.

If you have any other questions or suggestions, please contact us.