Cautious Online Shoppers More Likely to Buy From Trusted eCommerce Retailers!
Average Delay
The conclusion of “Digital Window Shopping: The Long Journey to Buy” in 2010 showed that the average delay between first visit to a site and final purchase was 33 hours and 54 minutes. This report shows that more than 54% of online shoppers wait between 12 hours to 2 days before making a purchase after reviewing an ecommerce website.
This does not come as a shock, back in 2007 McAfee reported that a combined 64.6% of online shoppers take more than a day to make an online purchase. Although price, competition, demographics, and other factors all contribute to this number, the #1 factor is TRUST.
So what does this mean to you if you own an eCommerce website? What can you modify to your shopping cart to increase your trust? Is there any web design changes your team modify to increase your company’s reputation? This article explains what WebBizIdeas recommends.
Increase Trust To Your eCommerce Website:
Securing Credit Card Information
Extended Validation SSL
Protect From Identify Theft
Credit Card Icons
Brand Names Logos
Featured PR & News Stations
Value Proposition
Prominently Display Contact Information
Organized Footer Links
Social Media Icons
Comparison Shopping Reference
Yahoo Buyer Protection
Copy Trusted Merchants Design
Add Product Videos
BBB Online Icon
Truste Seal
5 Underrated & Most Important Points
Navigation
Social Embedding Your Brand
Fulfillment
Presentation
Technology
The standard protocol for securing credit card transactions is Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). SSL is built into Firefox, Internet Explorer, and every major web browser so simply installing a digital SLL certificate on your server (i.e. web hosting provider) is all that is needed to “turn on” this security measure.
SSL Seals You Can Add:
Online store owners are going beyond the gold padlock (see above) to go green with Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificates. This does not provide any extra security, but it does assures website visitors that they are transacting on a highly trusted and secured domain. This type of visual assurance helps online merchants increase trust, reduce shopping cart abandonment, and build revenue.
Customers buy from ecommerce websites they trust. When you display the McAfee Secure certification, you not only increase sales by increasing shopper confidence, you build your brand with the security seal seen on more top sites than any other.
McAfee SECURE increases online sales by an average of 12% if the seal is prominently displayed. Our company uses this seal on
WholesaleKeychain.com and found similar results:
Many new eCommerce owners may not have the capital to make all the suggestion on this page. They may want to just get some “eCommerce Trust” features up on their website today. Adding credit card icons to the footer of a website is one of the easiest & fastest ways any business owner who accepts credit cards online can build trust.
Does your company sell brand name products? Another easy yet powerful way to increase customer trust is to prominently display logos of the brand names you carry. WebBizIdeas likes to add these to the right side of the footer (next to a SSL certificate seal) and in the header of eCommerce websites.
Has your company been featured on TV? Has your product been featured in well known newspapers, magazines, or online websites? If so displaying logos of these companies will build trust. WebBizIdeas likes to fade the logos in black & white. This allows the potential customer to be conscious that the product is well known but does not distract him/her from what we want them to do on the web page; example from
SmellyWasher.com.
Online customers like knowing what they are buying. Yes, every eCommerce website accomplishes this by simply listing out a product description. But what about their emotional need or want? A clear statement outlining the benefit of buying from your company accomplishes this.
A value proposition contains a quantitative statement about the uniqueness about a business. It tells customers precisely why they should buy from you. When a customer understands your value proposition (and it is what they want) a warm fuzzy feeling fills their body; i.e. trust has just been established.
How often are you annoyed when you cannot find a customer or technical support number? You have a very simple question and you just want to speak with a real person to get it answered RIGHT NOW. Another simple eCommerce Trust feature is prominently displaying (1) a phone number (2) hours of operation; showing customers you are a USA company. This can easily be accomplished in your top header.
Online customers look to a website’s (1) the header (2) the footer for information they can’t find in the left/right hand menu or body of a web page. For ecommerce websites, customers may want to know your company’s return policy, shipping & delivery rates, international FAQ, or even more information on an affiliate program.
Having an organized eCommerce footer design that includes all important links will increase trust with customers. Better stated, not having an organized footer design that includes all important links will decrease your reputation & trust with customers.
Without even reading all the footer links (from the example below) you immediately understand where to find what you are looking for if you have questions. You may also conclude that this company is a large online retail store (build reputation/trust) since they list awards, careers, and other resources. They do a nice job on including sales & customer support numbers along with a link to a live chat representative; example from
www.bhphotovideo.com
Another simple addition to the footer are social media icons. Today, online customers want to know who the company is before they order or re-order. Customers that can connect with employees & store owners through facebook, twitter, youtube, and other social media sites form a stronger relationship (i.e. trust) with the store. Example below from
http://www.bluefly.com
Another great way to improve your trust with a potential customer is to use comparison shopping sites to the full. BizRate.com has a great way of showing product & company review ratings for merchants. BlindSaver.com has taken advantage of this feature by linking to their
BizRate review page. (see example below) If they choose, they could also link to their
Google Shopping Ratings or other comparison shopping sites.
All Yahoo! Store merchants and Yahoo! Shopping advertising partners are eligible to participate in Yahoo Buyer Protection. These merchants must earn and maintain a minimum 3-star average merchant rating. Purchases made from merchants which display the Buyer Protection icon at the time of purchase are covered by the program regardless of the merchant’s status at the time a potential claim is filed.
What this means for you as a merchant is you can slap this large icon (see below) in the header and/or footer of your website and increase the buyer’s confidence. No word has been published on how this will continue to work with Yahoo’s new relationship with PriceGrabber.
Have you heard of Amazon.com? Have you purchased from Amazon.com? Do you trust that Amazon.com will deliver a product you purchased on time? Have you seen the ‘add to shopping cart’ button below? Although it is not an exact copy, it is very similar to Amazon.com checkout button. Yes, we are saying that copying highly trusted merchants designs can rub off a little trust on your site. People buy from who & WHAT they are familiar with.
Would you buy a product from an online store that didn’t have a picture of the product? That sounds absurd, of course you want to see what you are buying before you buy it. In fact, many quickly lose trust in online store that have poor product pictures. Do you think this concept carries over into video?
YES, online customers trust merchants who display product videos. Sign up on YouTube, upload your product videos (optimize them), and copy & paste the code in your product description to show off the quality of your product.
A very basic trust building icon you can add to your site is the BBB Online Icon. Add this to your footer and make sure users can click on it to view / verify your profile. BBBOnLine Business Application
Truste is a privacy policy certification. If you are an eCommerce website that collects customer information or a sell software this is important. Displaying the seal will increase your customer’s confidence in your business. Sign up for the truste seal
People shop online for convenience. Buying a product online vs. a retail store saves them time, energy, and frustration. It takes a mom a lot of time to drive to the grocery store, find a parking spot, keep the kids from running around the store, find the food she needs, wait in a 20 minute grocery line, checkout, listen to the kids cry for candy, and eventually drive home in rush hour traffic. Don’t build this environment, make your eCommerce website convenient & easy to shop at.
Search Engine Friendly Navigation
Convenience starts with navigation. Your navigation starts with
SEO Architecture. Make sure an SEO consultant reviews the navigational structure of your website. How long will a new potential customer stay on your website if they first discover your website from Google and land on the wrong page? Do you think they will browse your categories trying to find the right page? Will they use your internal search feature to find what the product they searched for? Will they call you for help?
NO, in the first 3 seconds of being on the wrong page on your site they will (1) lose trust in your company (2) leave your website (3) view your company, brand, and products in a negative way. Don’t frustrate your potential customers by making them spend more extra time & energy to find your products; hire an SEO consultant to make sure your website is
search engine friendly.
User Friendly Navigation
After a new visitor is on your website, it also needs to be user friendly. No one will trust an online retailer to fulfill an order if the person trying to buy it can’t even navigate the site. Hire a
web site architect to plan out your website.
When a consumer first visits a website they sense a kind of chaos. They are unsure if your site is vulnerable to hackers, if your company can fulfill their order on time, if your shopping cart is reliable, if you are in the USA, if you are going to give out their personal information, if you are the low cost leader, if your shipping rate is high, and every other imaginable question; you are in a battle for establishing trust within seconds of a user visiting your website.
This perception of chaos leads to the desire to be in control. For online shoppers, being able to navigate to the required pages they need to feel comfortable is a fundamental concern. Potential customers needs to be assured they will receive what they want.
This all starts with prominent value proposition. Besides the product information, most of the time the main pages people want to see is the return policy, privacy policy, and shipping policy. Along their journey they want to see seals of approval (SSL / Visa) to ensure that control has been established. It is only once this sense of security is established that a visitor can focus on trust. Make sure you hire an experienced web architect to
plan out the navigation of your website.
Have you ever purchased a product because a friend or family member recommended it? When deciding what & whom to purchase from online a positive reputation is important. You can’t fake a brand, especially in today’s online social environment. Even if you have a strong brand it can easily be tarnished by not keeping promises.
Due to the risk of people who have the power to control your brand in forums, blogs, facebook, twitter, yelp, and countless social media websites every eCommerce owner needs to actively & offensively attack the risk by embedding their brand in social media to build trust.
How do you do that?
If you wanted to make changes in your community you may get involved in an HOA, run for office, or even create an organization to combat a serious issue. The same holds true online, your company needs to create sustainable open & honest communities where your brand can respond directly to criticism.
Yes, this involves creating a facebook account. Getting up bios, pictures, and links is the basics. But, finding your target market within your market and then engaging them is the next step. Some questions you will need to ask your self are:
- What type of content or conversations does the target market expect?
- What is the biggest reason the target market connects and how is this delivered?
- Who should be responsible for engagement?
A Lesser-known brands need to have amazing fulfillment to compete. In fact, any new web based retail store must have excellent fulfillment to be trusted.
What is fulfillment?
In short fulfillment for an eCommerce website clearly indicates how orders will be processes and provides information on how to seek resources if there are problems. From the time a purchase process is initiated until the product is received is fulfillment; not just ordered.
- Protection of Personal Info: Does the customer confident his/her information is guaranteed to be used for no purpose other than what it was given for?
- Confirmation: Is an automated confirmation email sent to the purchaser? Does it provide where the order is being shipped, an order summary, amount billed, estimated delivery date, option to print an invoice, and most importantly where the purchaser can get help with reviewing or changing the order.
- Tracking: Is order tracking available? Can a customer securely login from your website to track their order? Can they login and see past orders & re-order? Is an automatic email sent to the purchaser when shipped?
- Recourse: Does the purchaser know, or can he/she quickly find, the process to follow if a problem exists ANY time during fulfillment.
- Return Policy: How clear is your policy stated?
- Simplicity of Process: How simple was it to buy the product? Is your checkout process as easy as Amazon.com?
Of course fulfillment for an eCommerce website depends heavily on navigation, but steps can be built in to improve fulfillment for eCommerce websites. A good example of on-page changes that has been done to is smellywasher.com. You can
view step 1, if needed
step 2, and finally the
trusted order page.
