The barrier between a visit to your site and a conversion (a sale, an enquiry, a download, a signup) is trust. The pseudo-anonymity of the internet brings out the worst in people and web users are paranoid. Long-time users are smart enough to be wary; newbies don’t know enough and are naturally cautious. So how do you gain people’s trust? It all comes down to honesty and transparency. Here’s what I suggest:
- Publish your phone number on every page of your site.
- Publish your address too!
- Maintain a personalised “about us” page, with names, short bios and contact details of the people behind the business.
- Include your photograph on that page.
- Show customer testimonials from other business people, linking to their sites.
- Keep ads to a minimum; lots of ads usually mean you don’t have the visitors best interests at heart.
- “Hijack” the trust of established brands (like in the photo, people already invest a lot of trust in Google: using Google search on your site means people will trust the search results; the same goes for PayPal, Verisign, and so on).
- Link to your competitors; what have you got to hide or lose if you’re product or service is trustworthy?
- Show your prices up-front; if people don’t like them on your home page, they wont like them at the end of your sign-up process either. Be open with what’s most important to the customer.
- A techy one from Dave: keep your SSL certificates up-to-date!
- From Eamon Leonard: keep a blog! This is a great way to get a feel for the type of people behind the site.
- Another from Eamon Leonard: publish a privacy policy; but make a human-readable version, rather than using the legalise in most policies.
All of these are essentially things a con-man would shy away from. Anything else I missed?
Update: Added a couple points from Eamon Leonard.
16 Comments
hold on a second there… link to your competitors?
I really don’t think that’s the best idea. You may have nothing to hide but who says your the cheapest. Often users find it hard to find all the sites with the product to compare prices. If there on your site why would you help them move away from your site. I think it will help some but most of the time this isn’t practical.
I like the other comments, in particular the image in the about us page.
I think to add to that, make sure you say that your site is secure. You can use SSL Certificate logo’s to do this.
People worry about putting there credit card in so show links to external sites stating your site is secure helps alleviate there worry. As you said hijacking the verisign brand can do this.
A few others to add to the list:
I think having a professional blog can go a long way to building trust - especially if you blog about the product or services you sell or the industry you work in. This blog, in fact, is a very good example of that, and was one reason that I approached Eoghan for design help on a recent project.
Also, this should be a given when seeking to build trust with a user, but having a site with functionality that is both usable and actually works should be top of the list - I’m sick of seeing badly designed and coded shopping carts… come on! they’ve been around for over ten years now… no excuse…
The choice of third party credit card integration I think it a subtle one… I tend to trust a site more if it’s been integrated with Realex or even Paypal over the likes of Worldpay - maybe it’s just that I’ve seen so many badly integrated Worldpay checkouts.
Finally, I know that the consumer affairs people have been cracking down on some rogue Irish sites out there, and their guidelines mention some of the points above, like contact numbers and addresses, but two important ones, from an Irish perspective at least would be to have published and linked to your policies on Privacy, Data Protection and Refunds / Returns.
Eamon.
oh… and good content, grammar and spelling wont do any harm either :-)
I agree with most points, but not the showing your prices up front.
My rates are tailored to specific clients, for example, I wouldn’t expect a local church group to pay the same amount as a multi-national for a logo design.
I prefer to ask questions before quoting a price because almost every project is different (timeframes / revisions etc.).
Every project is different, but for commercial work the starting point is usually the same. (i.e. sites from
Bah!
My comment got eaten from the euro sign onwards, I hope it’s still there somewhere, Eoghan if not, I’ll re-post.
If you are clear that your published prices are guide figures only and not a set price then I’d imagine it can only be a good thing.
You can weed out the guys who are looking for a 200 euro website and it removes the awkwardness of presenting a quote as the client will already have some kind of a ball park figure. Of course you may need to justify why you are charging x amount of euro more than your website states but it encourages you to provide a much more structured quote and I think that’s probably a good thing?
Because of my association with www.Irishbusinesswomen.com I have done some research on how trust develops in forums. The most important thing is Reciprocity, or treating others as you would wish them to treat you and doing so because you want to be helpful and not because you want rewards. Being positive and supportive of others without the immediate expectation of reward usually brings even more reward in the longer term because you develop a reputation for being helpful and trustworthy. I believe a similar approach in blogs brings the same result. You can build a reputation for yourself over time, but I’m not so sure that you can design it into a web site. Someone summed it all up for me in the expression “Givers Gain”
Providing tangible contact details is a legal requirement under EU law, though it may only apply to LTDs.
I can’t imagine why anyone would link to a competitor unless it were to do a price comparison.
Photos - what if you aren’t photogenic? I’ve seen some truly horrendous photos on company sites that did little to improve things for anyone
Your blog’s time setting is off by an hour by the way …..
Derek: Re linking to your competitors: remember, this is strategy for trust. It must be used alongside other good business strategies: e.g. outdoing your competitor in quality, support, speed of delivery and so on. If you can’t do this, it won’t work. A good example of where you can’t outdo a competitor in terms of quality is when you’re both selling the same product. In this case, linking to them would be a bad idea.
Eamon: Blogs, privacy policies: both excellent points. Will add them to the list.
Frank: I’m not so sure you can design for reputation, but as Eamon mentioned, a blog can be used to build one over time.
Michele: “I can’t imagine why anyone would link to a competitor unless it were to do a price comparison.”
What about a quality comparison? We don’t all sell on price, you know! :-)
Re being “photogenic”: I’m not advocating attractive photography to build trust; what’s important is that there’s a real face behind the name. A person on the other side of the site you want your visitor to invest time / money in. Ugly people can be trusted!
“Ugly people can be trusted”
Haha.. great statement.
It depends what you are selling.
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