How to Ensure Customers Trust Your Website

A solution like a virtual terminal from Authorize.net makes it easy to accept and process online payments. However, there’s still one hurdle you have to overcome. Before visitors to your website pull out their credit card and make a purchase, they have to be certain that their personal and financial information is going to be 100% safe.

The key to preventing visitors from ditching your website before completing a purchase is to ensure they trust you. While this may sound like a tall order to fulfill, the good news is there are actually quite a few ways you can convey the fact that you run a trustworthy business:

Prominently Display a Phone Number

As a technologically adept business owner, you probably stopped drawing a distinction between “online businesses” and “real businesses” a long time ago. However, for a large percent of the population, this is still a significant concern. Luckily, there’s an easy way to show visitors who fall into this category that you’re a real business. All you need to do is prominently display a phone number on each page of your site. Even if visitors don’t actually pick up the phone and call you, knowing they can will make them feel good about your site.

Add Personality to Your About Page

It’s human nature to desire connections with other people. You can leverage this desire by using your About page to create human appeal instead of the impression of a faceless business. Increasing the effectiveness of this page can be as simple as adding a few personalized sentences about yourself or your employees. And if you’re not convinced that anyone actually looks at your About page, checking out your analytics data is quite likely to surprise you!

Include a Recognizable Badge

Multiple studies have confirmed that people feel more comfortable making purchases from sites that include a badge they recognize. Options that fall into this category include the BBB, McAfee Secure and TRUSTe badges. The one caveat to this addition is the studies found that more wasn’t necessarily better, so it’s best to pick the most relevant badge for your specific business.

Use Real Pictures and Testimonials

Given the fact that even smartphones now include quality digital cameras, there’s no reason to plaster cheesy stock photos on your website. Instead, as with your About page, real pictures give your business a face. And while testimonials are very powerful, don’t worry about polishing them to perfection. When news leaked that Zappos used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to proofread and correct their customer reviews, the overwhelming response was that this extra step actually decreased the trust levels of potential customers.

By taking advantage of these simple but very effective tips, you can give your website exactly what it needs to close more sales!

Tags: E-commerce