How to Beef Up Your Ecommerce Site's Credibility
You should never underestimate the intelligence and eye for detail of online customers - they want a business they can trust, an ecommerce site that will not only give them their money's worth, but also make them feel safe and secure during the transaction. An IP address validation service, for instance, allows your ecommerce business to integrate IP-based location information, distance calculation, and other geographic intelligence into Web-enabled applications and business processes. But there's more to it than providing secure transactions - it's called overall credibility.
It's important for you to be transparent. Be clear about your company, goals, and motives, and one simple way to do this is by providing comprehensive information on your About page. Identify the person or group that backs the business, through text or video presentation. It will give your business a face that customers will always look for.
Blogging helps. Commit yourself to blog posts and features that will enrich your customers' knowledge of the business and industry and will prove that your site is a "living," constantly updated one. Don't forget to use a dedicated SSL certificate, too. It is relatively cheap and usually requires very little effort on your part. Make sure, too, that your Checkout page doesn't include content that is not securely loaded (a Warning message tends to be displayed if this is absent).
Security badges or icons placed on the site lend credibility as well because these standard graphics demonstrate nothing less than security. Credit card icons show payment-processing integration on your site. As for SSL certificate providers, they usually provide badges that clients can click to check the use of standard encryption on the site.
Contacting you should be easy to do, so pay close attention to phone, email, or live chat. Make known a phone number (toll-free, if possible) and return voice messages right away if you can't always answer the business phone. Provide a link to a contact form on every page, too.
Policies should be published and linked from your site-wide footer and within the Help section. These should include, at a minimum, your privacy policy, return policy, and shipping policy. Customer testimonials are just as important to establish credibility, so publish them on your site. People can spot fake testimonials easily so don't make them up.
After making the sale, thank the customer for the transaction. The first order can make or break any credibility that you've probably worked hard for, so be fair, provide a good e-shopping experience, and apologize if there are errors done.
As for returning to the basics (which is ensuring security), IP address validation is a Web-based service that will validate IP to help prevent fraud by enabling immediate correlation of customer provided contact information with actual customer IP location. It can increase customer engagement as well, as IP geographic data can be used to customize geographically-focused offers per specific regions. Tools like an IP address locator can help your sales team realize its goals and achieve its targets.
Learn how IP address validation can improve your ecommerce site's security.
Category Article Credibility, Ecommerce, Sites
