Can your customers trust you?

Posted on April 6, 2009 by Asi Erenberg

If you’re a niche ecommerce business, establishing trust is your top priority. Here’s how

If I had to choose the single most important attribute of a niche ecommerce business, I’d say it was trust.

Establishing trust with your customers is crucial to the success of an online business. For you, the business owner, it translates into a higher conversion rate and a lower cart abandonment rate. For your customers, it translates into the ease of mind that leads them to feel comfortable handing out their credit card information, without worrying about identity theft or number stealing. They have to believe that your ecommerce site is the front-end of a real, legitimate business that will supply what it says it will – not a scam that will take their money or their credit card number and disappear into cyperspace.

eCommerce Trust t shirtAnd when there are no face-to-face interactions, and everything they see is virtual (no “real” store, no “real” inventory, no salespeople), it’s absolutely essential to achieve that bond of trust with every potential customer - fast.

That’s true for any ecommerce site, but it’s especially true for specialty or vertical sites, just because niche businesses tend to look small. The whole point of a single-focus site is that it caters to a narrow range of potential customers with very specific interests, dispersed world-wide. But those customers are more inclined to trust a big business such as a chain or department store than a small operation.

Look at it from your customer’s point of view:

  • There are so many fraudulent websites out there, so many cases of identity theft – why should anyone believe that your website is a bona fide ecommerce site, just because it says so?

  • If they’re nervous and aren’t reassured that it’s safe to shop with you, they’ll just go somewhere else. The number of online stores available is growing daily – they don’t have to compromise.

We’re not discussing your products here. Perhaps you sell brands, perhaps it’s no-name, perhaps it’s services. Doesn’t matter. What matters is the message your customers get from your website. And that’s got nothing to do with the reliability, or reputation, of what you’re selling.

Of course I’m not the first to point this out. Ecommerce-website designers have been researching the problem of trust since the dawn of ecommerce. And what’s emerged is - let’s call it a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy of Ecommerce. You want to jump aboard? You’d better know how to behave! So here, in a nutshell, are the bare outlines of the guidebook:

  • Make sure your website has a professional look-and-feel. An ecommerce website has to radiate professionalism in order to inspire confidence. That means not just the big picture (aesthetics, usability, ease of navigation, decent response time and so on) but also the details – no obsolete content; no dead links or other error messages; no spelling mistakes.Don’t trust yourself to check your website out. Ask some friends to spend a few minutes on your site and tell you if it looks like it belongs to a professional company or a mom-and-pop operation.

  • Give alternative ordering methods: fax, email, regular mail. This says that you know some customers don’t want to give out their credit card numbers online. You don’t require it in order to do business with them. That alone reassures the wary that your site isn’t just a scam to grab their credit cards.

  • Have a clear returns policy – on a page of its own, with a clear link to it from every product page.

  • Have a clear and reassuring privacy policy – and make sure it conforms to the “industry norms” that customers expect. No, you don’t keep a record of their credit card information. Not even in an offline database. No, you don’t reveal their personal information to third parties, and most especially you don’t sell it to advertisers. And so on.

  • Use security seals and third-party authentication:

    • SSL certificates from recognised providers such as VeriSign reassure customers that their sensitive personal and credit-card data is encrypted for transmission.

    • Business-identity authentication services from providers such as TRUSTe, BBB online, Web Trust, or Chamber Seal provide proofs that this site is indeed a legitimate one with a Real Business behind it.

    Remember, this is necessary but not sufficient – if your site doesn’t look like a Real Business, your customers won’t get as far as checking its authentication.

  • Make sure they know who they’re dealing with. That’s the function of the “About Us” page. Who are the people behind this site? (Include some photos of them – only please, in business contexts, not a group photo in shorts and T-shirts from your recent company barbecue). What’s the business behind this site? (Include your Mission Statement, your Vision Statement, your Value Proposition. Don’t have any? Now’s the time to write them!).

  • Get a toll-free number (800). Doesn’t cost much but makes you look like a “big company.” That’s reassuring because big companies are perceived as established and unlikely to disappear, as opposed to “fly by night” operations working from Gmail addresses and post-office box numbers.

  • For the same reason: give your phone numbers (both regular and toll-free) and other contact information on every page. One good place is in the standard header to every page. Remember that people looking for products can land from a search engine on any page of your site, without going through the home page. Whatever page they land on, it has to reassure them that they’ve reached a reliable company. The best way to start reassuring them is to give adequate contact information, including your physical location (address) on every page.Oh yes – and that phone number should be an office line not a cellphone. Would you purchase from an online store whose only phone was wandering the galaxy? A cellular-only phone number invites the conclusion that there aren’t any premises to install a fixed line in.

  • And about that “Contact Us” page: at the very least it should give your business’s full address (not just a PO box number which to many people translates as “we don’t have a real address”), phone and fax numbers, and email address(es). Preferably it should also have:

    • Names of the people responsible for various aspects of the business (e.g. sales, order fulfilment, technical help, etc.), with their email addresses and/or phone numbers. Make sure there’s a link to the “Contact Us” page from the “About Us” page too.

    • If you don’t have several available staff members, at least have multiple email addresses, such as sales@yoursite.com, customerServices@yoursite.com, info@yoursite.com, and so on. These might all be aliases pointing to your own email address – but the customer doesn’t know that. Make sure these email addresses use your business’s domain name. Nothing destroys credibility faster than a business that uses a Gmail or Hotmail or other freebie webmail address, just like a teenager.

    • How about a photo of your premises? – the office, the warehouse or fulfillment house – especially if there’s a sign with your business’s name in the foreground of the picture. Again, it helps reassure your customers that there’s a real business out there.

    • And if you’re offering a local service, consider including “directions to our office” with a link to the map from a web service such as Google Maps.

  • Have a Testimonials page - let satisfied customers do the talking for you.

  • If you like to go the extra mile, add a favicon to your URL, it will make your company look big and important.

For 2 good examples… go to http://hangers.com/ and www.BabySling.com.

Like I said, that’s in a nutshell. But if you’ve got all that, you’re way ahead of the crowd.

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