You’ve spent hours getting your SEO right. You’re spending your hard earned cash on ads to bring customers to your site. The last thing you want is for them to bounce from your site straight away because they don’t trust you.
As an eCommerce website, the success of your venture depends on building and maintaining trust with your customers. Customer trust is key to driving sales, generating repeat customers, and ultimately growing your business.
This guide will advise on building trust in e-commerce and explain why it is so important.
What Does Trust Mean in eCommerce?
Trust is an essential component of success in eCommerce. When a shopper visits an eCommerce store, they are trusting the online store to provide them with a trustworthy experience that will result in a conversion.
For eCommerce businesses, customer trust and customer loyalty are key components in gaining and maintaining success.
Brand trust is also a crucial factor as customers need to know that they can rely on the brand to deliver quality products or services. To further enhance this trust, eCommerce businesses must ensure that all products sold are authentic and not counterfeit and provide secure online transactions.
Ultimately, trust is a crucial factor for any successful eCommerce business as it encourages shoppers to shop online and boosts customer loyalty and satisfaction.
How To Measure Consumer Trust
Customer trust is a key factor in any business, as it drives conversion and loyalty. To measure customer trust, analyze customer feedback from surveys and reviews. Look at customer ratings and comments on your products and services to get an idea of how satisfied customers are with their experience.
Another important measure is the quality of interactions between customers and staff. Analyze the frequency of repeat purchases or inquiries to determine if customers continue to do business with you.
Finally, track the number of referrals from existing customers to new ones as this indicates trust in your brand. By measuring these metrics, you can gain insight into customer trust and use it to develop strategies for improving your business.
How is Trust Built?
Consumer trust is built through transparency and clear communication of policies and procedures, as well as by providing excellent customer service.
Companies must strive to build customer trust if they want to succeed in eCommerce; without it, customers may not feel comfortable making purchases online.
Read on to find actionable steps you can take to improve trust in your website.
Look Professional
It sounds obvious but if your store looks unprofessional it is tough to establish trust. Customers make snap decisions about websites. Make sure you make a good first impression.
Create a recognizable brand identity with a strong logo and design. Apply your branding and color scheme consistently throughout your site.
Ensure your site isn’t slowed down by images that aren’t optimized. Slow sites can be perceived as unprofessional and in turn untrustworthy.
Implement simple and clear navigation to key pages such as your policies, contact us, about page, and to your product pages. This will enable your customer to find all the information they need and put their mind at rest.
Launch Cart makes it easy to have a professional-looking store with very little technical knowledge required. Setting up menus and navigation is a doddle so creating a trustworthy store is simple.
Offer Secure Payment Methods
Make it easy for online shoppers to pay for their purchases on your eCommerce site by providing them with options, but not too many that the customer has to think about.
Use secure payment methods that people recognize such as PayPal and Stripe as familiarity helps remove customers’ concerns and may speed up the process as their details
The good news is that Launch Cart offers many payment provider options including Paypal, Stripe, and many more.
Be Transparent & Have Clear Policies
Humans fear the unknown and any lack of clarity or information increases a buyer’s perceived risk of buying from your site.
Make sure that your site has clear policies. Explain how the buyer’s data is protected (Privacy Policy), how you run your business (Terms of Service), whether you offer refunds and or exchanges (Refund policy) and what happens if the item doesn’t arrive or is damaged in transit (Shipping policy).
Where possible, enhance your returns policy. Offer a generous policy that allows for simple returns and exchanges with the objective of 100% customer satisfaction.
Provide detailed information about the returns process in your policies and summarize or link to it from your product pages.
Launch Cart includes functionality to include all of these policies and you can auto-populate each of them with Launch Carts templates and then adjust to meet your requirements.
Processing & Fulfilment Times
Customers want to know how long their item will take to be delivered and where the item is being shipped from. Don’t leave them guessing, include this information on your site and ensure it’s easy to find.
Include the time it takes to create your product, pack your product, and ship your product. This sets the customer’s expectations correctly, which is especially important if you are using a print-on-demand partner and or shipping internationally.
I add key information like this to my product descriptions and include key information in my policies.
Have No Hidden Costs
Be sure to disclose any additional costs and fees upfront. Import duty, sales tax, shipping, VAT, etc all should be clearly stated.
Clear & Informative Product Pages
Use clear product images of the items that you sell so that your customer can see exactly what they are buying. Remove any and all doubt by showing the product from different angles.
If you are selling clothing, show the item laying flat and being worn.
Detail what the product is made out of and include a size guide.
Your product descriptions need to be more than just the print-on-demand partners’ default description. Leaving just the POD supplier’s description is lazy and looks unprofessional.
The clearer you can be the better. Remember you gain trust by answering all the questions the customer may have. So, consider what questions you have when you buy items online
Include About Us and Customer Support Pages
Create a fully populated About Us Page. Use it to explain who you are, your mission, and your company’s USP.
If you have other shops, for example on eBay, Etsy, or bricks and mortar stores, mention them here. Doing so will further enhance the customer’s perception of your business and your credibility.
Have a Customer Support page or Contact page and include contact details including email, phone, and physical address. Whilst you may not want to include such details if you are running the business from home, it gives customers peace of mind.
With Launch Cart it’s easy to add a Facebook Messenger chat icon, so customers can live chat with you and you can offer a better customer support service. Be sure to respond promptly to customer inquiries and don’t leave questions unanswered as this may reduce the trust a customer has in your store.
Use Trust Badges
Trust badges are an essential element in creating a successful store. They are a visible way to provide shoppers with the assurance that their data and payment details are secure and that the store is legitimate.
A shopper’s willingness to buy from a website can be significantly increased if they are presented with recognizable trust badges, such as McAfee Secure, Norton Secured, or Verisign-protected.
You can place the badges in your product pages and, if you sign up for a paid plan on Launch Cart, you can edit your checkout page and include trust seals there too.
Use Social Trust Signals
If you have social media pages and profiles with a good number of followers, you should display links to them.
Launch Cart makes it simple to add social media icons to the footer or header of your Launch Cart store just by adding the links in the settings.
If you engage with customers on social media channels and respond to customers’ comments, customers will see that their feedback is seen and valued.
Display Customer Reviews
Using social proof like online reviews and testimonials from customers is proven to be one of the biggest ways to build trust in eCommerce and an essential step in your content marketing strategy.
Displaying good reviews, especially those with pictures gives shoppers confidence in your, your business, and the products themselves.
Launch Cart provides customer review functionality as standard in all plans, even the free plan. If you sign up for a paid plan, you can customize how reviews are displayed.
Communicate Post-Purchase
Building trust doesn’t stop once the customer has made a purchase. Continuing to build trust will result in loyal customers.
Use post-purchase emails to provide order confirmations and order updates.
Once the item has been delivered, email the customer to ensure they are satisfied. You can also ask for a review at this point, in return for a discount voucher.
Conclusion: Built Trust in eCommerce
Trust is key in online shopping. The customer experience is different when shopping online. You cant pick up the product, touch it, or talk to the shop owner or staff in the same way as shopping offline.
So, one needs to build trust in other ways. By implementing the tips detailed in this article you can build a trust-worthy eCommerce store with Launch Cart.
