Ecommerce Trust Drivers: How to Gain and Retain Your Customer’s Trust

A successful business is based upon a fulcrum of satisfied, enthusiastic, repeat customers. How do you turn customers into regulars? Getting people to your site is one task; convincing them to make a purchase is a whole new ball game. Not only do you need to have good products, good images, and good product descriptions, but you also need to be trustworthy. And in this post, we’re going to walk you through integrating ecommerce trust drivers into your store.

Picture this scenario.

You’re walking down the street, and someone comes up to you and asks if you want to buy their car. Now you haven’t even seen the car. You also don’t know who this person is. Would you buy the car? The answer is no.

That’s because you don’t trust the person selling it to you. Even if you were in the market for the car. The way they’ve approached you unannounced doesn’t fill you with any trust, and so they’ll lose the sale. The same goes for ecommerce. If someone lands on your site and feels as though you’re untrustworthy, they’re not going to buy from you. It’s as simple as that.

Don’t we all have that brand we always pick up from the store without even checking the price? We all have those brands that we are very loyal to. This brand can be the toilet paper we are used to buying, the peanut butter brand, or the phone that we are used to, or even the football team’s tickets or merchandise we are supporting. With these brands we’re so loyal to, we can adjust our budgets somehow to get the product or service. But why is this good for ecommerce businesses?

Importance of Customer Loyalty

Loyal customers are very valuable for any type of business. Besides the intrinsic satisfaction of a job well done, there is also a pragmatic reason for courting repeat customers. According to the Harvard Business Review, acquiring a new customer is 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining one, and Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company research shows that a 5% increase in customer retention means more than a 25% increase in profit.

Not only does it make economic sense to have a consistent customer base, but it is far easier to understand, nurture, and cultivate continuing business relationships than to continually set up new client interactions. Both are necessary for a thriving venture. New clients provide excitement and a chance to prove yourself, and the established clientele provides structure.

Let’s look at some of the things you can deploy for ecommerce trust on your own site to boost sales and turn customers into regulars.

Reviews for Ecommerce Trust

People trust other customers more than they trust you. Instead of you telling them that your product is the best, it will hold more weight if they hear it from your previous customers instead. In a consumer trust survey, 25% of respondents stated that they trust a product’s rating if between 11-50 people reviewed it, and another 21% trust if they see between 51-100 reviews. This is why reviews are so important. When people look to buy a new product, what they’re really looking for is to see whether other people just like them enjoyed the product too.

If you have reviews for your products, they should be displayed in an obvious place so people can see them. In most cases, this involves including reviews on specific product pages. Also, don’t worry if you don’t have 100% 5-star reviews. People understand that not everyone will be completely happy with every product they buy, and so having a range of reviews at different levels can actually be a good thing. Converse to that, though, if you only have 1-star reviews, you should use this feedback to improve your product.

How to Display Reviews to Convey Ecommerce Trust

Amazon does a great job of highlighting reviews on its site.

As you can see at the very top of the page, they show a star rating as well as the total number of reviews. It means a user gets a glimpse of the quality of the product without having to scroll all the way down.

Compare that to this product listing by Joann.

With no reviews present yet, how do you know whether the quality of the product is any good? What Joann could and should try to do is encourage their customers to leave a review after they have made a purchase. They might offer 10% off the next order for any review or simply ask within the transactional confirmation email.

Security

The basis of ecommerce warrants that someone has to complete a monetary transaction online. For most people, this is second nature; the idea of entering your card details online and hitting purchase is a natural act. But for many shoppers, they’re hesitant to freely hand over their credit card details if the site doesn’t appear trustworthy. Let’s take Amazon, for example. You’d have no issue entering your card details on there. After all, they’re a retail giant.

But the same might not hold true for you. If you’re a smaller ecommerce retailer, you need to add trust badges that show you care about your customers’ data and their credit card security. In this example, VitaDaily uses a range of different trust indicators on its website to show that it cares about its customers’ security.

This is especially important for products like supplements or when you’re dealing with edible or health-related products.

Returns policy

What do you do if a customer buys a product and decides they no longer like it? Most ecommerce stores have some level of returns policy. Wherein, after a set amount of days, if a customer is not happy with their purchase, they can get their money back. This in itself builds trust. You feel more confident buying a product because you know you can return it if it’s not what you were actually looking for.

The thing to remember with ecommerce is that your customers can’t touch or see the product in real life. Now, this is no issue if you also have a presence in brick-and-mortar stores. A customer may have seen your product in a store and decided to buy online at a later time. But if your only presence is online, you need to make sure that you’ve covered all your bases and offer your customers the option to return the policy. It’s also important to note that your returns policy should be visible and easily accessible on your site.

Most potential customers are lazy, and if they can’t immediately find the information they’re looking for, they’ll buy from another vendor. But, if you create a dedicated return page for your customers and make it easily visible, you and your customers can always be certain how long you have to return your products and the process of doing so.

Customer Support & Be Available

Having a responsive and helpful customer service is a major factor in creating brand loyalty. At the end of the day, no matter how trustworthy your business is, or seems to be, there will still be instances where a customer has an issue. Perhaps their product hasn’t arrived by the agreed shipping date? Or maybe the product arrived, but it was faulty or not as described. And you might find that even potential customers have issues. Maybe they want to buy a product but need help choosing the best one. Or suppose they’re ready to make a purchase, but your checkout form doesn’t seem to be working.

Regardless of the cause of the issue, if you want to build trust, you need to make sure you have a good to excellent level of customer service and that your team is available to address and resolve issues. These employees must be sympathetic and listen to customers’ complaints carefully, and come up with the best solution possible for both sides.

Now that’s not to say you need to be online every single moment of every single day, although if you have the resources to have a 24/7 customer support team, that would be beneficial. It means that when a support request comes in, you handle it in a timely manner. It also highlights that when you have a specific issue like shipping or returns, you can speak directly to someone who deals with those sorts of issues. Also, as the employees face the customers and their problems directly, it is also a good idea to ask them about the problems customers have and possible solutions to get rid of those problems.

Creating a Personal Relationship with the Customer

If customers believe the customer service was genuine and they helped the customer in the best way that they could, they will most likely stay committed to the brand. Give yourself a margin in making promises, guarantees, and contracts. When you exceed expectations, that experience is what your clients will remember. This memory will stay with them and remind them that their expectation was exceeded, and will probably get you a solid reference from customers.

Reaching customers through the same channel they have reached you would help to build a better relationship. If someone reaches you via social media, replying through social media helps. Or if they do not reply, it is obvious that they do not want to be contacted.

Feedback

Getting feedback from the customer is the only way businesses can understand what is working well or not with their strategies. So getting feedback from the customers will help you improve your business. If you get bad feedback, it is an excellent opportunity to solve the problem and make customers feel better about your brand. Asking new customers why they preferred you instead of competitors, and asking existing customers how you could improve things, would get you the right feedback.

Rewards

Reward your clients. Have you considered a loyalty program, whether formal or informal? It makes your customers feel like they are not only getting a bargain but that they’re part of a community.

Transparency Drives Ecommerce Trust

Transparent businesses naturally come across as more trustworthy as they’re happy to share their processes. When it comes to being transparent, you can do this in a number of ways. You might decide to show full transparency as to where you source your products and materials from or where the revenue you make goes, whether that’s directly to pay your staff, reinvested into improving your product, or even donated to a charity.

Ecommerce trust – get it right!

Customer loyalty has so many benefits for companies. And by taking some simple actions, the number of loyal customers can be increased. Simply, we can conclude that having responsive and helpful customer service, establishing more personalized relationships with the customers, and taking all feedback into account are the basic steps. Being creative with these main ideas will put your business ahead in the market.

Installing trust indicators on your website is crucial for gaining sales. When someone lands on your website, without prior knowledge as to who you are and what you do, they need to know that they’re not making a mistake handing over their money. If you haven’t yet thought about building trust in your business model and site, the time to start is now. In what ways do you build trust in your ecommerce site? Don’t forget to add one new trust signal to your store this week!