How to Build a Trustworthy Ecommerce Site?

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The saying goes: consumers buy with emotion and justify their purchase with logic. Studies have shown time and time again for this to be true. But what if emotion and logic are secondary thoughts before a purchase is made? What if at the forefront of the customer's mind is trust?

Running an eCommerce business and making sales completely online is a trust game. From the moment a customer lands on your business's website they analyze all kinds of factors to determine if this is an online retailer they can trust, to not only make a purchase from but if they can trust your business with their information, money, and time.

Get ready to take notes as we jump down the rabbit hole of what it takes to establish trust as an online eCommerce retailer.?

How do you establish trust?

3 factors determine a person's state of trust. They are; the chance for gain, chance for a loss, and uncertainty regarding the matter.

Uncertainty will always be the outcome when both probabilities are equal. This uncertainty usually results in low conversion rates, increased cart abandonment, and a high bounce rate. All things that have a direct effect on your sales performance. Let's take cart abandonment, for example.

Data shows us that many customers abandon their carts due to hidden charges or fees during the checkout process. The customer initially displays full trust, being sure about the product and selecting it. But immediately shows an almost equal amount of distrust on finding unexpected additional charges added to the product cost during checkout, resulting in an abandoned cart, lost sale, and dropped conversion.

Understand choosing to trust is an illusion of choice, but an underlying psychological state that can be influenced.?

Consumer distrust most of the time is based on specific fears which directly increase the impact of their perceived risk.?

Here are some of the top fears consumers have when shopping online. Look at your current website and ask yourself if you're presenting these fears to your customers.??

Deciding to trust.

When a customer visits your website, they initially want to spend money. It’s the things that they find while scrolling through your site that take them from wanting to spend money to asking themselves “is the store real?”

The top 3 most important factors were

1. The site displays trust markers to reassure shoppers

2. The site displays a clear contact number and address details

3. A friend, colleague, or family member has used the site

The top results show us just how trust can be influenced and swayed toward probability for gain through simple things like trust markers, past customers, & contact details.?

Trust first starts with site structure.

Your website is the middleman between you and your customers. Although just about anyone can design a nice-looking site, it also needs to be functional to create revenue. One of the main functional aspects is trust. As a web designer, creating trust comes well before trust markers, reviews, or contact details.?

It starts with site structure, information architecture, psychology of color, font selection, & copy.

Site structure

The way your website is structured determines what type of experience the user will have. A website full of pop-ups, slow load times, broken links and unprofessional design raises red flags immediately. A great user experience is vital in creating consistent sales and more importantly, trust.?

Information architecture

I can tell a novice-designed site from a mile away. Most of the time it’s due to how the information they’re giving is presented. Information architecture is just as important as site structure. The goal of information architecture is to classify the content in a clear and understandable way to form relationships between site content, allowing users to find what they need with as little effort as possible.

Psychology of color

Believe it or few people don’t realize the impact colors have on their emotions. Choosing the right colors for your site and for branding is crucial. As web designers, we handle the style of a site,? as well as the movement it makes, the emotion it creates, and its purpose, based largely upon the color choices.

The core benefits of choosing the right color come down to how color helps us to process and store images more efficiently. This can help increase brand recognition and help prompt visitors to your site to take action and, more importantly, help in establishing trust.?

Font Selection

The font you choose determines the tone of the information being given for the user to engage with. Our associations with different fonts trigger powerful ideas and emotions. In a logo, this means that the colors, shapes, and even the fonts need to work together and relate to each other harmoniously while displaying the unique values of the company.

In a website conveying the idea that your business is respectable or traditional, then you’d choose a font style that’s rooted in ideas of heritage. Choosing a font that doesn’t convey the message of your brand means a complete disconnect & lack of trust between you and your customers.

Copy Writing

Creating copy that builds trust starts with understanding the needs of your customer and then convincing them that your solution can ease their pain most efficiently. The easiest way to do this is to write in the brand's tone. If your brand is premium, write to give the user a premium feel. The key is to create trust through words with fonts, colors, site structure, and information architecture.

Consumer trust & your website

After a website has been designed & developed, implementing trust indicators that consumers are familiar with is the next step. Many consumers have learned just what to look for before fully committing to making a purchase online. Trust seals & certifications, social proof, & contact information are all prime examples of this.?

Do trust seals really make a difference?

According to a 2019 report released by the National Retail Federation, online-only sales have accounted for about 30.2% of online sales fraud. Although trust badges on your website are from third parties showing your site as legitimate, the most important certificate to have is an SSL cert.

SSL is the acronym for Secure Sockets Layer and is the Internet standard security technology used to establish an encrypted (or safe) link between a web server (website) and your browser.

This certification is usually signified by a lock in the top left-hand corner of the URL bar. About 79% of online shoppers said that seeing a seal shows that their information is secure.

Also, note that just displaying trust seals and badges of certification on the homepage once won’t establish the trust needed to make a sale. Remember that showing these badges and seals throughout the sales funnel creates reassurance for your customers and influences them to trust your brand. Adding to the trust badges, seals, and certificates should be a page listing your privacy policy.

A Privacy Policy is not only the legally required document to disclose your practices on protecting personal information, but it's also a great way to show users you can be trusted, and that you have procedures in place to handle their personal information with care

Should you include your company’s mailing address?

Physical addresses are one of the biggest proofs that you exist and are not operating out of some devil’s armchair. Contact information gives a strong indication that there is a real person at the other end who can be approached should anything go wrong.

Is Social proof really worth it?

In the marketing arena, social proof is all about using the idea of the human masses and their views to create positive connections around your brand.

Statistical studies show that with hearing and reading peer reviews about a product/service as opposed to a company’s description of the same product and service, consumers are 12x more likely to buy. Here are some prominent categories within social media that we are going to talk about further:

Product Reviews/Testimonials/Logos

Displaying Statistics on Product Adoption

Media Mentions

Having the trust of your customer can literally make or break your business. Being sure to incorporate all these things mentioned starting from the design of your website all the way to implementing social proof all help with influencing the customer's trust in your favor. Creating a functional website can be difficult but not impossible. It all starts with knowing your customers.