These days, it’s fairly easy to get an online store up and running — and if you dip your toes into PPC, you can even start getting relevant visitors quite quickly. That’s when the true challenge arrives, though, as it’s converting that really matters. Internet users will readily browse at great length with no intention of actually buying anything. If you want them to commit, you need to win them over. So how do you do that?
Well, in addition to offering a powerful value proposition and providing a great user experience, you need to focus on trust. If someone wants what you’re offering but isn’t quite convinced that your store can be trusted, they won’t order from you, and it’ll be a huge waste of effort.
In this post, we’re going to look at how you can build an online store that people can actually trust. Follow these steps as best you can, and it’ll help you establish a brand worthy of meaningful loyalty. Let’s get started.
Create detailed product pages
You need to use product pages to provide as much detail about the products as possible. You won’t get better opportunities to talk about what makes them worth buying, as you can have great confidence that anyone on such a page is looking to be persuaded, but that can’t be your only goal. If all your content feels promotional, shoppers will feel that you aren’t interested in helping them make reasoned decisions.
This means including things that won’t sell people on your store in particular: things like exact specifications (measurements, materials, patterns, etc.) and product guides. The more in-depth you get, the more confident visitors will feel that you’re not looking to exploit or trick them, and it’ll set your store apart from those of your competitors.
Be sure to include as many high-quality images of the products as you can, with at least some of them framed to be informative instead of compelling. If possible, you should offer 3D product images: there are various online services that can help with this. Framing everything in eye-catching ways will cause issues when shoppers want to look closely at the designs, particularly when they’re close to buying but want to feel absolutely certain they know what they’re looking at. Clarity is a mission-critical concern.
Promote consumer-protection policies
In an ideal world, you’d never have to deal with a return, or have to offer a customer their money back to alleviate their dissatisfaction — but this isn’t an ideal world, and every seller (no matter how popular and accomplished) has to deal with such things. You might not like talking about your consumer protections (perhaps you fear that it’ll encourage people to abuse them), yet it’s vital that you do if you want shoppers to trust you.
While you have to offer a return period of at least two weeks for online purchases, extending this to 30 days or more and offering a free returns service will help build trust with shoppers. And you mustn’t make your returns policy tough to find: if you bury it somewhere in your website, shoppers will miss it, or assume that you won’t honor it. Create a dedicated page for returns and complaints, and make it incredibly easy to find.
Keep in mind that a return is not always the end of your journey with a customer. If you impress them with your process, perhaps helping them find an alternative, they’ll be more likely to shop from you again and talk about you in positive ways online, serving to bolster your brand resilience. You’ll also keep their contact details and have opportunities to send them marketing materials in the future.
Invest in your store’s security
Making your online store safe and secure should be one of your main priorities, as you can’t expect someone to enter their card details and personal information into a site that seems unlikely to keep their data safe (whether because it has a bad reputation or simply looks to be lacking in security measures guarding against threats like DDoS attacks or trojan horses).
It’s essential that you commit to a straightforward and professional layout. If your store looks unsafe, it won’t matter how tightly it’s secured: people just won’t trust it. Stick with a simple navigation that works quickly on any platform. Throwing in extra videos and features will inevitably slow things down, cause irksome clutter, and damage mobile-friendliness.
But before you get to that point, you need to have a reliable foundation in place. Hosting is a huge part of security, particularly in open source ecommerce where exploits are relatively easy to find: part of the appeal of full-service managed hosting services is that they allow flexibility while keeping threats at bay.
Investing in a strong host will also give you something to talk about in your content, as you can display security badges reflecting the various systems and standards used for your hosting solution. Such badges may seem somewhat trivial, particularly since most people won’t know what they actually mean, but they can be very impactful. A handful of security badges shown during the checkout process can convince someone to stick around.
Of course, it’s all well and good to secure your store’s external defenses, but it’s crucial to have solid internal security policies in place, too. Implementing strong governance practices using a system (such as Diligent) may not be immediately apparent or visible to your customers, but it will decrease the likelihood of internal data breaches. By prioritising governance you create a stable foundation for your store, fostering a reliable and credible reputation that encourages long-term customer loyalty.
Set out some valuable FAQs
FAQ pages can serve to establish trust with shoppers by showing that you pay attention to the needs of your customer base. Answering core questions in highly-visible ways will make it optimally easy for shoppers to find the information they need without needing to contact you (which is great because most people prefer to avoid reaching out in that way).
The best FAQ pages anticipate all the things that lead shoppers to be unsure and provide compelling answers. You can cover what your store is, who runs it, how products work, how your delivery system works, how you handle returns and many other things. As a bonus, they’re also highly potent for boosting SEO: Google loves extracting FAQ information as it heavily includes vital keywords and reflects how people format their search queries.
Make it easy to get in touch
If someone visits your online store and can’t find a way to contact you, they might form some doubts about the legitimacy of your operation. It’s hardly uncommon these days for someone to create an online store, offer products at oddly low prices, take people’s money, then shut the store down and leave no way for the people they’ve exploited to trace them.
And while people prefer not to need to reach out (as noted), they want to have the option of doing so if they really can’t figure out what they want to do. Some shoppers actually prefer to engage in live chat so they can ask for recommendations. Providing the option of talking to a real person makes an online retailer feel more solid in an impactful way.
When you assemble your Contact Us page (and you do need such a page), go the extra step of adding such a live chat feature, even if you can only make it available during limited office hours. Knowing that they can get immediate responses (if only during a set two-hour window each day) will help shoppers feel reassured — but if you offer such a feature, you need to deliver it. Being slow to respond after promising a live chat will ruin your reputation.
One of the key priorities when building an online store must be to make it look trustworthy by designing it well, providing ample detail, and making it easy for shoppers to get in touch. If you can manage these things, you’ll have a much better chance of earning trust and converting visitors into loyal customers.