Make it Personal
People don’t trust pages or websites, they trust people. It’s crucial that our website has a human factor. We want to present our prospective customers with faces and names. We should use an about us to present not just information about our company, but a message from our company’s Founder or CEO (with an accompanying photo, of course) or Our Team section (with photos and names) - or both.
Look Professional
We should Show that was a “real” company with all the things a real company would have, an easy way to contact the business (a fully developed contact page) and customer service (a fully developed customer support section on our website, including a returns policy and a FAQs section).
Show that Others Trust You
Another way to “prove” that other people trust our company is by displaying the positive press about our products in the News section on our website. If your company has been featured in some well-known media, build some immediate trustworthiness with our site visitors by displaying the logos of the media your products have been favorably mentioned in on our homepage as Shopify does.
Prove that your Website is Secure
Today’s online shoppers are tech-savvy people, usually look for the additional “s” in their browser address bars, https rather than HTTP, and padlock symbols that tells them that a website is secured – an absolute necessity for an e-commerce website. Websites secure their servers by using secure sockets layer (SSL), a standard security protocol that encrypts data between a web server and a browser. To do this, the web server needs an SSL Certificate. Any full featured, worth-the-price e-commerce solution will provide the SSL certificate(s) you need so you can provide your customers with a secure checkout when they buy your products online. For your part, if your e-commerce solution doesn’t automatically display a notice to customers upon checkout that they are using a secure server as Shopify does, you’ll want to be sure you let your customers know your website is secure by displaying your SSL certificate symbol or a notice informing them of the fact.
Mitigate Customer’s Risk
Think about your e-commerce website from a potential customer’s point of view. What’s their biggest risk? That they won’t like your product – and be stuck with it and unable to get their money back. To increase the credibility of your site (and increase the chance that they’ll buy something from you) by addressing the concern up front, spelling out your shipping and returns policy.
The Bottom Line
When customers first encounter your e-commerce website, they do exactly the same thing they do when they walk into an unknown traditional storefront – look around, size up the place, and decide whether or not they trust the merchant enough to buy something from them. If you want them to buy something from your website, you need to do everything you can to make sure they find you trustworthy enough.