Trust is a tricky thing in E-Commerce. You already know trust is important for your customers, but a study by Buysafe showed that 81% of online shoppers are worried about shopping on unfamiliar sites. Two of the most common fears stated by online shoppers are that ‘it’s not a real store’ and ‘they’re going to steal my credit card information’. These are the kinds of issues that can be handled by some simple techniques that help you to convey trust.
This study breaks down the traditional trust building methods pretty well: A customer's trust in a website is likely to be influenced by the site's "market orientation", site quality, technical trustworthiness, and user’s web experience. As it turns out, website’s with high market orientation are typically also perceived as more trustworthy than websites with low market orientation. Positive ‘word of mouth’, money back warranty and partnerships with well-known business partners, rank as the top three effective risk reduction tactics. The simple version of that is just to have a site that looks good, has an easy checkout flow and doesn’t break when a shopper clicks somewhere weird.
Other traditional signals you can use are ‘trust seals’, e.g. in this example, sales increased 58.29%. Social capital is another; consumer reviews can be 12 times more trusted than product descriptions from the manufacturer. Of course, the mandatory privacy policy and GDPR pages are necessary factors these days. And even simply having an address and contact number on your page can signal that your site is a real thing run by real people in an actual place.
The hard part about earning trust with your customers is how quickly their expectations have evolved over the past decade. And this has been supercharged during the pandemic. Being easily reachable, having clear and easy return and refund policies, order online and pick up in store are all complex and resource heavy systems to create, support and maintain.
And with so many people have been locked at home with only online video to connect to people face to face with, live video chat has become one of the differentiating factors when it comes to who online shoppers turn to when they have questions. Remember those two fears I mentioned before? Shoppers are afraid they’ll get robbed, basically. Two of the other greatest fears they reference are ‘not being able to tell what a product is really like’ and ‘not being able to get help from a salesperson’.
Those two fears are where you can really differentiate yourself and build trust in a way that only face-to-face interactions can do, by taking advantage of live video chat. Reassuring your customers by answering the questions about your products they can’t answer themselves, being that friendly face they see on the screen when they just really want to ask a salesperson to explain something they don’t understand, that is how you build trust online. You have to be there for them over and over again. Making online shopping more human is how you gain your customers’ trust. Get started now.