I just finished designing an Ecommerce site and the in the site design, I put the contact us link in the header as given below:
The feedback I got was that they would like to add an additional link to the parent site in the top navigation and hence they would like to remove the contact us link and replace it with that link. I am not too comfortable with that since I believe the contact us link is important in an Ecommerce page ( I know we do have the phone number listed there but not everyone is going to want to call up) and it should be in a prominent place as opposed to just in the footer.
I modified the design and found that I can add the link to the parent site in the top navigation (next to the search bar) without having the menu look crowded but is there any research I can use which provides information about where a contact us link should be placed in an Ecommerce page.