Using trust seals to boost customer confidence in your online shop

Published on May 05, 2012 Using trust seals to boost customer confidence in your online shop

As online shops become an increasingly serious threat to existing bricks-and-mortar stores, more businesses large and small are getting online. This increases the range of products and services available online for consumers and increases the level of online competition. While this means more reputable stores coming online, it also means more scammers online. The end result is apathetic consumers made more wary and demanding than ever. Gaining customer trust is an absolutely essential element of running your online store.

Smart businesses are turning to verifying their site through third party privacy policy and security services to prove to their customers that they are who they say they are. Those third parties provide a personalised verification graphic, or trust seal, that can be displayed on their site.

Types of trust seal

There are four main types of trust seal:

• Privacy seals – provided by companies like trust-e, these companies review the privacy policy you have in place, and verify the key elements of it to ensure that you actually have the privacy policy in place that you state on your site
• Business seals – provided by companies like Comodo verify the physical location of your business, your business certificate and contact details are real. PayPal also have a PayPal Verified Seller seal available which you can turn on in the admin control panel for your store (if you have PayPal set up in your Ozcart store). This opens a new page that redirects to PayPal’s site and shows verification information.
• Security seals – provided by companies like the Verisign (now owned and operated by Antivirus company Symantec and operating under the Norton brand), GeoTrust QuickSSL Premium SSL certificate, these seals show that the security company has verified that things like your SSL certificate (which encrypts transactions on your store checkout) are active and protecting your site correctly.
• Ratings seals through social media like Google+1 and Facebook Likes, as well as shopping comparison sites like GetPrice show the number of reviews or affirmations of a particular site, product or page.

Choosing a security seal

The reputation of the company offering the seal is an important factor – as you need to put yourself in your customer’s shoes and think about whether the seal displayed would actually boost your confidence about the store and encourage you to purchase from your store.

For example, Norton is a popular anti virus brand and following their company Symantec’s purchase of the well known Verisign SSL/security brand have rebranded the Verisign seal into their own. This potentially has a strong brand recognition for end customers, especially consumers.

Before applying for a security seal check that SSL actually works on your checkout by going to the login page and checking that a lock appears in your browser. You’ll see something like this:

SSL protected – Safari

SSL protected – Internet Explorer 9

SSL protected – Firefox

SSL slows down page processing compared to non-SSL pages, so you will only want SSL protection on the pages that need it – your login page and checkout pages should definitely have SSL as these pages contain personal information about the customer (for example, their login name/password). Your payment provider will always use SSL and you should never enter credit card details into any page that does not have SSL.