Guest Blogger Monday: The Trust Exercise – Building Ecommerce Consumer Confidence

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July 18, 2011
By Aura Talbott, lead blogger, Miva Merchant

Welcome back to another great edition of “Guest Blogger Monday!” This week we have Aura Talbott, lead blogger for Miva Merchant with us. She shares some unique insights about trust in the ecommerce world. Don’t forget – you too can blog for Zippycart! Just check out our official information/submission page. We look forward to hearing from you!

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Ecommerce store owners know that gaining and maintaining the trust of their customers is essential to becoming successful. If a shopper feels like they can’t trust your site with their money and personal information, they will simply click away and complete their purchase elsewhere.

If you’re like many people, you’ve probably participated in a “trust exercise” at some point in your life – maybe at your work or in a club or social group. One person stands in front of another person, and the idea is that the first person will fall backwards, trusting that the second person will catch them. If this happens, then the exercise is successful and trust is established. If not, the situation rapidly becomes very painful for the catchee, embarrassing for the catcher, and awkward all around.

Put simply, trustworthy ecommerce sites always provide a safe place for their customers to land. Here are some tips to help make sure that your site can become, and remain, trustworthy:

Be Upfront: One of the most effective ways to establish trust is by being consistently honest and upfront. For an ecommerce store , this means providing clear, easy-to-understand information about your privacy policies, shipping and returns policies, product information,  and contact information. Without these in place, you run the risk of losing a customer’s trust when they have a question or need more information and can’t get an answer.

Be Professional: One thing that is guaranteed to scare away potential customers and cause their tentative trust in your site to evaporate, is a poorly-designed, unprofessional looking site.  It should go without saying, but broken links, missing info, or an overall visually-unappealing or outdated look and feel make customers nervous.

Another aspect of professionalism is customer service, which I discussed in a previous Zippy Cart guest blog post.  When customers call or contact your company, do they receive a prompt and friendly response?  Emphasizing what I said in the first section about being upfront, is it easy for them to contact you or do they have to search your site or even worse, the Internet at large to find your contact information?

Be Secure: At the core of all ecommerce sites is the checkout process. This is also where the highest rate of site and cart abandonment occurs.  Having an SSL (secure socket layer) certificate, security badges, and other security icons in place on your site reassures your customers that your site is a safe and secure place, but only if these things are valid and up-to-date.

If your SSL certificate expires, your potential customers will see a message pop up on their screen that asks them whether they want to leave your site or risk compromising their information by potentially visiting a site that is pretending to be your site.  If your other security features are invalid or expired, similar messages will also pop up during the checkout process, usually at crucial points along the checkout process, essentially serving as giant red flags that usually make online shoppers rethink their purchasing decisions.

Follow this advice and your ecommerce store will be ahead of most when it comes to being reliable and trustworthy.  Ignore it, and you’ll fail the trust exercise, causing your potential customers (and the resulting potential revenue) to leave your store and go elsewhere.

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Thanks, Aura! And thanks to all of you for checking back in with Guest Blogger Monday. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and check out #guestbloggermonday to keep on top of all our great Guest Blogger Monday posts. Join us next week when our guest will be Liz Elting, who’ll give us her take on going global for online businesses!

About the Author

Aura Talbott is the lead blogger at Miva Merchant, a leading ecommerce software and hosting provider. Over 50,000 merchants use Miva Merchant’s highly customizable, intuitive and scalable ecommerce software. These merchants range from hand-selected boutique product stores to manufacturers directly integrating their manufacturing with distributor access and an online retail presence.