Increase Your Ecommerce Conversions by Optimizing for Trust

When a business has a history of reliably fulfilling a customer’s orders, it has earned her trust. However, earning trust requires the customer to have past experience with a business. How does the owner of an ecommerce site get the newcomer to take a chance and make a first purchase? When it comes to ecommerce conversions, it’s all about appearances.

Business people look, act, and dress professionally so that people will feel comfortable doing business with them. So, one’s ecommerce site must also convince its visitors that they need not worry about losing their money or personal information to cyber criminals. The site must convince visitors that transactions will occur smoothly and that any issues will be promptly resolved. Those most adept at providing indicators that their website is trustworthy will see the best ecommerce conversions rate. Five of these trust indicators are discussed next.

Professional Design

The design of your ecommerce site should conform to the expectations of a customer in your niche. A site that sells video games shouldn’t look like one that sells industrial supplies and vice versa. For all e-commerce sites, there should be no coding errors, broken links, spelling mistakes, or broken images. These indicate either neglect or the work of an amateur.

Contact Information

Availability increases trust. Display a contact phone number or customer service number prominently on the header, or a link to a contact page with a phone number, email address, physical address, and a contact form. A live chat box also serves this purpose well.

About Us Page

Unlike the brick and mortar store where customers can interact with the owner and staff, the ecommerce site doesn’t benefit from this personal element. This is where the about us page comes into play. While there is a fair amount of leeway as to what you can place there, it’s important that you convey what you and your business are about. Tell the “why” behind your store. Photos of you and your staff make you more approachable and are especially effective at making your visitors feel comfortable about doing business with you. If your business has an interesting history, tell a story about how it came about. Don’t be shy about revealing your passion for the niche or the business.

Security Seals

If your e-commerce store uses a secure socket layer (SSL), seals with the SSL provider’s name such as Geotrust or Symantec are often available for display on your site. You can also have your website’s security checked by well-known services such as Hacker Safe or McAfee, who also provide seals for display.

Social Proof

Few first time buyers from Amazon.com ever feel much trepidation about doing business with them. Most are confident that Amazon’s immense success and popularity are proof enough that dealing with them is safe and that their transactions will go smoothly. If millions of people have no qualms about buying billions of products from Amazon, they can’t all be wrong.

This phenomenon of allowing the actions and opinions of others to influence one’s judgment is called social proof. One form of social proof that Amazon uses to great effect is user ratings and reviews. Even though your ecommerce site isn’t an Amazon.com (yet), you can improve your conversions using customer reviews, ratings, and testimonials.

If your products, service, and customer service are good, you should get positive reviews. However, negative reviews are always possible. A few of these make your reviews seem more believable. In addition, most people can assess the merits of both positive and negative reviews. Reviews given by angry or spiteful people will be seen as such by most viewers. If any negative reviews are legitimate, take these as useful feedback and respond by saying you are taking action to correct the problem.

When customers send you unsolicited praise about your products or services, ask them if they would like to send a testimonial for you to display. A testimonial with the customer’s photo along with her statement is highly effective.

If you haven’t focused on using trust indicators as a deliberate strategy, use the above tips to improve the conversion rate of your e-commerce site. The increase in profits are well worth the effort. For more information about ecommerce conversions, techniques, and how to improve your ecommerce profitability, contact us today.