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10 Factors That Help Build Trust Online

Although a number of factors come into play when a customer makes a buying decision on the Internet none other is more important than trust.

Ultimately customers choose to purchase from a given online retailer based on their ability to trust the transaction taking place. Therefore it should be no surprise that all successful business relationships require building trust with the customer. If you can’t build trust with your potential customer you won’t get the sale.

To illustrate let me give you a brief example.

For simplicity sake let’s say you have a flat tire on your car. You need that car to get from place to place and thus you need that tire fixed. It’s not a desire but rather a need-a necessity.

Your door bell unexpectedly rings and a man in a greasy jumpsuit is standing there. He says he was driving by and noticed that you had a flat tire. He points to a rusted out old pickup truck loaded with tires heaped in the back and says he’ll sell you a tire on the spot.

He indicates that he will even install it for you at no extra charge. You glance at the truck and find no sign indicating the business he represents. Furthermore the state of repair of his own truck leaves you questioning his ability and honesty.

Would you buy it from him? I doubt it. Even though you need the tire and you need it now, the likelihood of you completing the transaction at that moment is hampered by your ability to trust the seller.

Can you trust the tire will be installed correctly? Are the tires old, new, refurbished? Why are they just thrown in the back of his truck in a big unorganized pile? Who does he work for and is his business even legit? What are his qualifications? These questions–along with others–are all examples of what would likely go through your mind.

Each question involves basing a decision upon trust and because of the lack of it in this case, the sale will likely be lost.

The above example illustrates how much of an impact trust plays in the final decision making for consumer. Now let’s turn our attention to the impact trust has online and detail numerous factors that can help you build it.

Factors That Influence Building Trust

Before we delve into how to build trust let me just state there are many ways to misconnect or disconnect with site visitors and thus break trust.

Most often it can be seen in bad design (which equates to the rusted out old pick-up truck and unorganized pile of tires in my offline example) or usability issues. A few of the most common design and usability mistakes I’ve seen include: use of pop-ups, poorly designed shopping carts, weak checkout processes, lack of customer assurance items such as ssl seals, shipping information, payment methods, returns policies, and unresponsive or unprofessional customer service.

Those are just a few of the factors that most often break trust. There are more, but I want to really focus on building trust online not breaking it so let’s get into that now.

Below is a detailed list of items you need to consider for helping build trust online.

Usability

Building an ecommerce site with a specific target audience or market in mind is critical to the ultimate success of the store. Yet, this need is too often overlooked by many-coordination and communication is they key.

Graphic designers are rarely aware of the impact their use of animation, images and graphical text can have on search engine visibility or compatibility with mobile devices. In a similar vein, programmers developing backend functionality are not frequently educated on the impact of dynamically generated content and code can have on visibility and browser compatibility.

Most importantly, the entire development team may create a site that looks absolutely wonderful on all screen sizes and types, but is, in fact, very difficult to navigate to accomplish a desired task. One answer is to involve a usability engineer and search engine optimization specialist throughout the development process.

Don’t neglect the KISS principle (Keep It Simple Stupid). Make your site simple and informative. Oftentimes the more information you provide the greater your chances are of customers not trusting your brand and becoming confused.

Security

Get a private SSL Certificate (vs. a shared one) and keep it up-to-date.

Clearly display the seal and words like “your transaction is 100% safe and secure” on all pages of your site especially in areas where you are asking for personal information like credit card numbers.

Uniqueness

Few ecommerce stores operate in markets where there is no competition. To stand out, it is essential that you differentiate yourself from the rest–this is often called your UVP or unique value proposition. It’s what will make a customer choose you over your competition when all other factors are closely related or constant.

When a prospect visits your site, how are you differentiating yourself from the competition?

Too often, companies use their competitors as a baseline when developing their own site. While this is not a bad idea (providing your competitors do it right and you have done your homework), make sure that when you design your site it is not so closely related to your competition that it takes away from your uniqueness.

The inclusion of key differentiators and less tangible benefits like your brand identity, culture and values all factor into the overall customer experience and are what will help you gain the competitive advantage.

Social Media

Don’t neglect social media. Social media includes things like Twitter, Facebook, and can include blogging. Taking advantage of this new channel can help give your company a personality, an identity beyond the site itself. Harness the power and you can create trust through relationship building.

Contact Information

It seems obvious to include contact information on a Web site, but far too often, companies bury this information or omit it completely. All sites should include the basics: contact form, phone, fax and mailing address. If you do business locally you may want to consider including a map to your location as well.

Don’t hide from your customers or they will hide from you.

Visibility

The presence of your site across the internet through marketing and promotion also helps build trust. The more positive exposure you can get for your business the greater the trust.

Get mentioned in blogs, get listed in search engines (using both paid and organic methods), send out press releases, run contests, sponsor events, etc… These are all ways to gain positive exposure for your business and create trust at the same time.

Respect Your Audience

Know who your customers are and respect their needs.

Any B2B company worth its salt will have one or more of the following elements on its site: industry certifications, reviews, awards, press coverage, articles, customer testimonials, case studies, product demos, free trials and white papers.

The key is to understand the benefits of each in building trust, and determining relevance to your company, industry and target audience.

For business-to-consumer (B2C) Web sites such as e-retailers, there are entirely different expectations and requirements. Some of the more important site elements include: strong brand/identity, security certifications and guarantees, shipping, return and privacy policies, customer testimonials and product reviews, merchandising, promotions and product comparisons.

Rather than get distracted by the bells and whistles, it’s critical to ensure the site functions reliably and visitors are able to find what they are looking for without the need to dig deep for it.

Anticipate Every Question

I’ve written numerous articles on answering your customer’s questions before they ask them. This is done through first understanding your customer and then placing the proper elements in the right locations on the site to address their concerns at precisely the right moment they typically would ask.

Anticipating their questions and answering accordingly helps build trust. Any impression of secrecy or preciousness, anything that makes a customer’s visit to a site difficult, can annihilate trust.

Confirm, Confirm, and Confirm

It’s often said the most important time for car manufacturers to advertise is within four weeks after purchase. Why? This is the period during which consumers need confirmation they’ve made the right choice. The principle is no different online, but the reality is more important than in the brick-and-mortar world.

Confirm orders placed with emails to the customer immediately following a successful sale. Confirm the shipment of the item when it is sent and include tracking information for them as well. Don’t forget to follow up with an email sometime after delivery (not to soon after) thanking them again and asking them if they are satisfied with the product or have any questions about it.

This type of pro-active approach builds a relationship that has trust as its foundation. Even after purchasing, customers want to feel they made the right choice. It’s your job to assure them they have.

Answer customer inquires quickly

If a customer asks a question, answer within 24 hours. Nothing can hurt your business more than not responding to a customer inquiry on time. It sends a message that they are not important enough to warrant a quick response and often leads to lost sales and bad pr.

Trust is built on a foundation with a multitude of influential elements. The fewer of the above elements included in your Web site, the greater the likelihood the visitor will go elsewhere, like a competitor’s site. By following the above recommendations, you are all but guaranteeing an increase in trust and online sales.

Got some more? Add them to the list by leaving a comment below.

Google Commerce Search Unveiled

This is something new and I have not tried it yet but I still thought it was interesting enough to bring forward here.

Google recently unveiled a new Ecommerce Search Solution. It looks to be geared toward big ecommerce retailers and the pricing scheme for it will depend on the number of products/items on businesses’ data feed and search queries.

The Official Google Blog says Commerce Search aims to make the otherwise cumbersome task of searching for products on e-commerce sites easier and more fun.

The features Commerce Search provides are as follows:

• Lightning fast Google searching technology applied to retailers databases enabling consumers to find the right products in a snap
• Scalable hosted solution that aims to increase seasonal query volume
• Search refinement functionality that can automatically generate groupings based on user query and matching items
• Easily manageable product promotions that provides complete control to marketers and e-commerce site administrators
• Full customization option for controlling how products are displayed on search results landing pages
• No additional adminstrative cost for deployment and maintenance
• Customized reporting and statistical analysis via integrated Google Analytics

Information on Commerce Search it can be found here:

http://www.google.com/commercesearch/

If anyone has had any experience with this new tool I’d love to hear about it. What are your thoughts?

Most Important Parts of an Ecommerce Home Page

In one of my previous posts titled Most Important Pages on an Ecommerce Site I mentioned the most important pages on an ecommerce site.

In a later post titled Most Important Parts of a Product Page I broke down the various sections specific to a product page. In this post I wanted to point out a number of elements that should be present on the home page of any ecommerce site.

Although a well optimized — from an seo perspective — ecommerce site will likely receive traffic entering on any number of sub pages (rather than the home page), the home page will see its fair share of traffic.

Keep in mind I am not saying the home page will receive less traffic than other pages on the site. I’m saying that any number of pages on a site can be the entry page. This is how each website should be built anyhow — each page being considered a separate landing page which can receive traffic at any given moment from any source.

The home page though does play an important role in the overall picture of a successful ecommerce site. It is the page that many visitors will turn to even if entering first on another page within the site and is the page that no matter what, can set the tone for the rest of the visitor experience.

Although not the only elements, I’ll present below 4 important elements a good home page should possess for driving ecommerce sales.

1) Displays a clear offer. It can have multiple offers but works best when the “featured promotion” (that which you are looking to push hardest) is given prominence. If this is a monthly sale you run, give that sale front and center attention then support it with additional creative.

The image below shows an offer that could be considered the feature.

It clearly attracts your eye even when additional offers are presented and drives home the message that if you buy from Overstock.com you get free shipping on your entire order.

The offer, although simple, does even better to win the sale though. It creates urgency through adding just one simple word — today. The use of that one word alone strengthens the offer for building sales on the company side and persuades the visitor to act now or else potentially lose the opportunity to receive free shipping.

I talked about creating urgency in my post titled Planning Ecommerce Promotions.

2) Contain a clear call to action. A call to action persuades the visitor to act upon something. This can be clicking a banner to see the monthly sale item(s), signing up for a newsletter mailing, adding an item to their cart, etc… Each of these actions should contain a call to action that supports the end result.

Common calls to action on a home page might be in support of sales, new products, daily features, and more. An example call to action would be a banner with details on the sale of the month and the text “click here to shop now!’

The image below is a good representation of the use of calls to action.

3) A clear and precise navigational path for accessing site content. This may seem logical, but many sites neglect the “clear and precise” portion. They provide navigation not thinking of how it is presented nor how it will impact their visitors.

4) Multiple presentations of accessing the same information within the site. Most home pages receive a variety of visitor demographics. Each visitor is seeking products to fit their needs yet each searches in a different manner to get to those results. One visitor may use the main navigational elements within the frame work of the site while another may prefer to read a little more before committing themselves.

You must learn your demographics and address them accordingly. To illustrate this point let me present this conceptual example. Let’s say you sell beach clothing.

Two different visitors arrive at your site — both looking for the same product.

The first visitor is going on vacation in the coming weeks and is looking for an outfit to wear on the beach. The second visitor lives on a beach and is looking for the same outfit.

Navigation that might speak better to the first visitor would be a heading that says “Outfits for Vacation” (with a subset of links pointing toward things like beach outfits, bathing suits, sundresses, etc…) while the second visitor may respond better to categorical navigation that simply says “Bathing Suits.”

A good example of how to deliver links to similar content from different angles can be seen in the home page screenshot below. Take note of the lines connecting links to similar products. Notice how they appear in not only different context at times, but also under different headings — each targeting a different search habit based on visitor demographic.

In order to get your home page working to drive visitors deeper into your site you must speak to the various demographics in a language they understand. To do this you obviously must know what your visitor demographic is compromised of. If you’ve planned out your business correctly then you should have a good idea of the answer to that question.

If you don’t know the answer you better go back and find it out. You can’t expect to grow business by randomly targeting any person that comes to your site. The list of items I presented in this article should give you a start for shaping your home page to work for your audience.

The Most Important Pages on an Ecommerce Site

To be successful in ecommerce you need to be proactive not passive. Continually analyzing to discover problem points and testing methods that better those points is essential. You must market, promote, adapt and be willing to go out on a limb in some cases — thinking outside the box. You must continually monitor the customer experience your site delivers to your visitors and ensure the layers of that are working together.

You cannot sit back and expect sales to come in simply because you have a website listing products which target a specific market — even if you are getting loads of traffic to that site. If you are not going to be proactive you are not going to see results.

During my coaching engagements with store owners I often see the same underlying mis-conception in where to focus improvement efforts, and what objective to target first for increasing sales conversion.

As the old saying goes, “you must crawl before you walk and walk before you run.” To expect conversion increases without first targeting the most important areas often ends up in frustration.

For example, to focus on the checkout process in an effort to increase sales when your website analytics shows that the majority of your visitors never even make it that far will yield nothing. Why? Because if your visitors are not even making it that deep into your site then they can’t checkout anyhow. It goes to say that if they don’t see the checkout process then making adjustments to it will not yield additional sales.

So where should you focus your improvement efforts?

To answer that question for every store is difficult. Each business is different and each situation needs to be analyzed in order to develop an action plan for improvement based on the unique circumstances and objective desired. You should let your website analytics dictate where to begin.

However, although the answer to that question is not clear cut, I can certainly give you a starting point for focusing improvement efforts. You see, although each ecommerce site is unique, the pages that visitors encounter — on any ecommerce site — which influence them to make a successful purchase remain fairly consistent.

If you are wondering where to focus your improvement efforts try adding these pages to the top of your list.

1. Home Page

Oftentimes (unless paid search or SEO efforts dictate otherwise) the home page of a website is where a bulk of your visitors will end up at some point — if not right from the beginning.

The home page needs to effectively speak to the visitor demographic(s) in such a way that they desire to continue deeper into the site. If they don’t move past your home page (often indicated by high website bounce rates) they aren’t getting to the product pages. If they aren’t getting to the product pages they likely can’t add an item to their cart. If they don’t add an item to their cart, they won’t checkout. Got that?

The home page should, at the very least, give visitors multiple options for accessing the products on your site and should have some room reserved for the latest promotion.

If your website has a high bounce rate from the home page, you need to first focus your efforts on that page with the single objective of getting deeper visitor penetration into the site (i.e. increased pageviews, longer time on site.) This is one example of what I meant when I referenced the “crawl before you walk …” statement above.

2. Product Pages

It is from this page that most product information is gathered and questions are answered which ultimately lead the buyer to adding an item to their cart. Take care in your presentation, placing wording, descriptions, photos, and customer assurances in the best location to persuade action.

The goal of a product page should be to get the user to add the item to their cart. You can’t make a sale if the item is not in the cart!

3. Checkout Pages

Once an item has been added to a visitors cart the only way they can get out of your store with that product is through the checkout. This is a critical part. Think of it … you have an interested visitor who has a product or products in their cart and that likely wants to become a customer. The only thing keeping from that now is your checkout.

The checkout process should definitely be monitored for abandonment rates using website analytics. In Google Analytics I recommend setting up a funnel and associated goal for this process alone to keep track of its effectiveness. You want to know where in this process people may leave so you can refine it to capture future opportunities.

The ultimate goal of the checkout process is to get the visitor out the door with a successful sale. Keep in mind though that for multiple step checkout processes you may likely need to develop smaller incremental goals throughout the process to get to that final objective. Your abandonment points reported by your tracking funnel will tell you where and what these smaller goals should be.

In Summary

There are an almost unlimited number of areas on a website which contribute to higher conversion. In reality, the entire customer experience must be considered if a sustainable and profitable ecommerce business is the goal. The list of pages I provided here are just a starting point for organizing your approach.

Although these pages are important (each serving its role in closing the sale) changing just one will not always guarantee increased sales. You will need to interpret what your analytics is telling you in order to determine which page(s) to devote attention to.

Pay particular attention to your visitor click paths and develop an action plan for improvement with realistic incremental goals as the objective. Think big but be willing to start small. Measuring and expecting incremental improvements over the “ultimate goal” will result in that final goal being reached more often.

Remember, identifying and addressing the actual problem is the first step toward increasing conversion. You wouldn’t put the cart before the donkey and the same applies when looking for improvement from your website.

Finally, take it in stride making alterations to the most “problematic” pages first as reported by your analytics program. In doing so, you’ll be gradually building what I call a “trail to the sale” which will lead the visitor down a specific and intended path toward the end goal.

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