03.26.08

Top 10 ways to build Trust for your Online Store

Posted in E-commerce, Entrepreneurship, Online Marketing, Payment Gateway at 1:21 pm by adrianoh

Like Human Relationship, E-commerce is all about Trust

1. Building Trust via Web Design

First impression counts. It’s not a must for your online store to look pretty or stunning, however, it’s important that your design, layout, color tone etc tailored to the taste and expectation of your targeted group of online shoppers.

If you sell all sorts of products without a specific niche, you might want to adopt a simple & clean design to suit a broad base of taste. But if you sell baby or kids products, then you bet your site must appear to be cute and liked by all the young parents esp mothers! Remember, your design communicates trust subconsciously to the online shoppers! Make sure all products details are easily searched and accessible too.

2. Sign-up for Payment Services that Your Customers Trust

Online shoppers are intolerant with risk, if they have a single doubt about the security of the payment gateway you are using to process their credit card details, I can assure you that you will lose them as a customers almost instantly as your competitors are always a click away.

Bottom line, sign up a trusted online payment system widely recognized by your targeted customers. If you are selling Internationally, use something that’s recognized worldwide, eg PayPal or Worldpay. If you are selling locally, use whatever services that is well known and trustworthy in that particular country - eg Maybank2u for Malaysia, eNETS for Singapore or Protx for UK.

Lastly, don’t forget to put up related payment gateway logo on your website! Click here to download high quality Visa, Mastercard, Amex Logos to place on your store (Use it only if your payment gateway supports it).

3. Get Testimonials from your Happy Customers

Nothing beats genuine testimonials from your happy customers! What others say about you once is ten times more powerful and convincing than what you said about yourself a hundred times. That’s a true reflection of the power of Word of Mouth (WOM) marketing which you can apply to your e-commerce store.

So, grab some testimonial from your happy clients. Best if can get permission to publish their photo (together with your products if possible).

4. Blog Your Way to the Top

Blog is probably one of the most interesting creation of the web. It’s a tool letting you share your thoughts or knowledge the informal way. It lets you connect with your customers or prospects and letting them having a peep at your wacky personality so they don’t need to hire paparazzi to hunt you down.

Why blog?

1) Dell also blog (ok..this probably is not really a good reason)
2) Expert always command trust and respect. It will help you to establish yourself as one of the perceived expert in your niche (works only if you share serious content and insights. no BS please)
3) Openly communicate with customers or prospects
4) Adding personal, human-touch into your store, telling them there are real people behind the website!
5) Good side effect - GYM loves blog so much that they will index your content almost instantly if you blog constantly with genuine content.

So, start blogging now! Take a look at how one of our customer - scrap-n-crop.com did it!

5. Buy a 3rd Party Trust Mark for your Online Store

The reality is, most people don’t feel completely safe when buying online, especially when buying from small and medium-sized merchants that lack a strong and widely recognized brand, like Walmart or Amazon.com.

Let’s take a look at the stats, 93% of U.S. online shoppers say it is important for an ecommerce site to include a trust mark of some kind on their site. In addition, three-quarters of online shoppers will only make purchases through sites that include a trust mark. Online consumers now are more security savvy than ever, they look for 3rd party logo, persuasive indicator telling them your store can be trusted. You want their business? Then get a trust mark for your store. Below are some of the options available:

• Buysafe.com (Bonded Merchant Seal)
• GeoTrust / Thawte / Verisign / Comodo (”https://” secure link that encrypts customer data)
• BBBOnline (Reliability Seal )
• Bizrate.com (gathers and shows ratings of users, you could achieve same thing using ebay.com feedback system - International or Lelong Member Verification System - Malaysia)
• HackerGuardian (Indicating your website is FREE from Identity Theft, Phising, web site and data security)
• Truste (Privacy Seal)

6. May I know what’s your Business Policy?

When it comes to online purchase, customers have a lot of questions in mind - Is it safe to purchase from you? When will the goods arrive? Do you provide guarantee on that particular product? Is their data guarded securely? Without any of the information, how can you expect them to confidently press the “Add to Cart�? and “Checkout�? buttons? Below are some of the “must have” contents for your store.

• About Us Page - Who’s behind the team? What’s your business philosophy? What story you have to tell?
• Security & Privacy Policy - How do i know you are not going to sell my information to make extra cash?
• Shipping Policy - Do you ship to my country?
• Return & Refund Policy (if any) - Can I refund my goods if i’m not happy with the products within 30 days?
• FAQs - Anything (almost) your online shoppers would want to know or probably will ask.
• Contact Details - Where are you physically located? Can we get in touch with you since International call nowadays are so darn cheap thanks to VOIP technology. Tips: Put your phone number in International Dialing format if you serve International Market, and of course don’t forget to provide your time zone, you don’t want people calling you when you are having a sweat dream..

By putting all these details and making it easily accessible, you are helping the customer to help yourself, apart from trust it communicates, it saves you money and tremendous time in handling customer enquiry, it’s definitely a win-win situation.

7. Get your store listed on high quality, human-reviewed directory
Getting your e-commerce store listed in high quality, human-reviewed directory (not spammy link sites) is another good way to boost confident of online shoppers in your business. People trust the directory, and they trust the websites that has gone through the stringent review process and placed in the related categories.

Some of the directories worth considering are Yahoo Directory, Botw.org, Business.com and Open Directory.

8. Build Quality Store that confronts to GYM webmaster guidelines
Search Engines likes high quality websites that provide Quality and Unique Contents, same rules apply to e-commerce store. GYM (stands for Google, Yahoo, MSN - the big 3 Godzillas of search) have a set of quality guideline for website. Just follow the guidelines when it comes to preparing contents for your products or your online marketing efforst (eg link building, we will cover more in future articles) for your store.

Do it right, search engines will drive Free, Organic and Highly Targeted traffic (as they are searching for keywords related to your products) to your online stores which could mean extra leads and extra profit.

• Google Webmaster Guideline
• Yahoo Webmaster Guideline
• MSN (Live.com) Webmaster Guideline

9. Always Show your visitors your Address and Contact Details

It’s amazing how many online stores don’t list their postal addresses and contacts. Ask yourself, would you even bother to buy from one website which you cannot locate the contact details? What if something goes wrong? If your customers don’t know who you are and where you live they might refrain from doing business with you. Don’t waste their time guessing - Give them the assurance they can trust you, show them where you live and how you can be contacted.

Take a look at our contact us page - We even show you how to get to our office using nice Google Map mashup. Click below to enlarge.

Tips: If you are US Merchants, do you know you can submit your business contact details and get listed for Free? Check out

• Google Local Business Center
• Yahoo Local Basic Listing
• Windows Live.com Local Listing

10. Always reply email PROMPTLY!

You will be surprised how companies treat email. My own experience, I contacted 5 vendors (all with websites & emails, obtained from yellowpages) for a price quote on the banner stands we are buying for exhibition purpose, guess what, only 1 bother taking time to reply, and of course they get our business. The other 4 we never heard of them until today.

Email is an important tool and we need to use it wisely, especially for e-commerce business as we use email extensively (from purchase confirmation until the email newsletter) to communicate with the customers. The speed of you responding to the customer matters, don’t forget to remind them to put your email (eg yourstore.com) in their email whitelist (approved list) so your email won’t accidentally blocked by SPAM filter.

Remember, how fast you reply genuine customer email (if you ever reply at all) makes a huge different on how “trustworthy” you are.

Summary
To sum it up, Trust is the most important thing when it comes to selling online. Trust is no doubt challenging & time consuming to build, you need to take a long term investment view and approach. Once the trust is built, it will lead to customer loyalty that generate more referral business and repeat purchase for you!

Start doing it now, show your visitors that your business is real and that they can trust you by using the tips above. Happy Selling Online!

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