8 Ways to Increase Customer Trust in Your e-Commerce Site
A cornerstone of any e-commerce site worth its salt is the factor of trust. Any well-converting site makes extra effort to convey to its customers why their site is a secure place for them to browse and shop. This post will explore some of the better-known solutions to this issue, as well as dig down into some tips you might not have considered before.
The classic signs of trustworthiness
There are a number of elements featured on e-commerce sites that cause customers to automatically associate them with credibility.
Security badges
Clearly, you don’t want to have these plastered all over your landing pages, but a security badge from the likes of McAfee or Norton will put many users at ease. Perhaps they won’t even be conscious of the fact that it is there, but their peripheral vision will register the badge and it will score your site some brownie points.
One case study by VWO found that simply adding these security badges increased a site’s conversion rate by about 72%.
SSL certificate
It sounds complicated, but all this actually refers to is the “https” and the padlock symbol which appear in your browser’s address bar before the website’s name. This is one of the first places that a user’s eye will land, especially if they are conscious about keeping safe online.
Any e-commerce site without an SSL certificate will usually see an extremely high bounce rate. Nowadays, 73% of pages loaded by Google Chrome have an SSL certificate. It’s also something that can negatively affect your SEO ranking if you don’t have one!
Customer reviews
For many users, nothing builds trust quite like seeing glowing reports from others. If you can manage to show real reviews that hype your website and service up, new visitors are going to experience a rush of confidence in you (and it’ll help with your SEO value).
Contact information
There aren’t many things which appear more suspicious than contact forms that appear to be hidden within your site, or worse still, no way of contacting you at all. If you don’t make it super easy to contact you, this is a big red flag for most people. It could make it seem as if you just want to receive payment for your service without delivering it, and remain uncontactable.
What else can you do to appear trustworthy?
Having covered some of the main marks of trustworthiness, perhaps there are some lesser-known tips for increasing your visitor confidence?
- Keep an updated blog. The connection might not be obvious at first, but an updated blog means that you care about your website and you actively look after it. If customers see posts written days ago, they will believe that you are invested in the site and will be willing to solve any issues they might face.
- Include a detailed “about us” section. Faces are key! Everybody trusts a website more if they can put a face to a name. List the key people behind the website, maybe even including their contact details.
- Offer a live chat service. Instantly being able to get in touch with a site representative is a key part of the purchase funnel for many customers. A 2019 study showed how 77% of customers would hesitate over making a purchase if live chat was not available.
- Quality check your ads. Make sure that your site isn’t riddled with ads. If there are too many ad spaces, the customer might assume that gaining money through accepting ads on your site is more important to you than offering a quality service. Another important point to note is that these ads are grammatically correct and contain accurate copywriting. Any sloppy content on your site, even if it comes from adverts, is going to reflect badly.
In general, readily providing your customers with the resources needed to make (and communicate about) their purchase is the common denominator among tools that evoke customer trust. And, rest assured that once this trust is secured, these customers will return time and time again.
