How Can You Make Your eCommerce Website More Trustworthy?

We all know that building trust with your shoppers is not an easy task. Even if you have the best product on the market, you’ll have to ensure that your eCommerce site conveys trustworthiness. The list of things you have to undertake to make your brand more trustworthy can be quite extensive. You shouldn’t just assume that sticking some trust symbols on there is going to do the trick, right?
In this blog post we are going to touch upon some of the strategies that should help you gain consumer trust and loyalty by means of website design, testimonials, and other hacks.
Ready to dive in? Read on.

I. Building Trust the Moment You Meet Shoppers Online

These days people do quite a thorough research before buying things online. They spend quite a good bit of time analyzing reviews and reading product descriptions. However, when it comes to urgent purchases, 74% of smartphone users choose to shop from an eCommerce website that looks relevant, regardless of the brand itself.
Hence, the task number one for you is to achieve trustworthiness the moment your potential shoppers see your brand website online. This includes the things like:

1. 1. Monitor and manage reviews on and off your eCommerce website. Note: Do not delete the negative ones as this is what makes your brand more authentic.
   2. Get active on social media, niche communities, and hobby-specific forums. Getting engaged in meaningful conversations with your target audience should help build brand awareness, and ultimately boost conversion rates.
   3. Partner with micro-influencers to build trust about your brand through the lens of relatability.
   4. Feature your products or services on news websites, local or global. This might be a daring initiative but it is totally worth it.
   5. Pay special attention to the way your website looks on Google and other search engines. Meta descriptions, title tags, URLs, and other elements communicate your brand value and, thus, influence click-through rates. There are a list of best practices to follow that will certainly help you show up higher in searches.
   6. The advent of Siri, Alexa and other digital assistants has thrust voice search to the forefront of search marketing. With 41% of the population using voice search at least once per day, this strategy may be effective for building trust with your target audience. Rich snippets and schema markup can help optimize your website for search engines, and stay ahead of your competition.
   7. Pair up and work with established brands. If a reputable brand is willing to pair with your company, it means that your company comes across as authentic and trustworthy as well.

II. Building Trust the Moment Your Shoppers Land on Your Website

Now that your shoppers have successfully landed on your website and are finding their way around, it’s time for you to get active and strike your shoppers as a trustworthy website that deserves their attention.
How can you do that? There’re at least a few tried and true techniques that can help you achieve your goal:

1. Make yourself available—your website visitors should be able to reach out to your customer support team whenever needed. Add a chat box to your homepage, make sure your company’s contact information is visible to everyone.
2. Implement all the latest tips and practices to ensure your on-site search performs well, especially if you have many items in your product catalogue. The more products you sell, the more complications your website visitors are likely to come up with shopping online.

Over a thousand SKUs where things start becoming complex, especially if you have a lot of variations.
Danny Shaw,
the CEO of Asterisks Consulting

1. Keep your product catalogue up-to-date. For that to happen, make sure your product descriptions are accurate and the items described are actually in stock. Consider adding extra product pictures showing different angles (a 3D model, maybe?).
2. Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) services continue explosive growth. With almost 50% usage growth in less than a year, this feature is mandatory for the modern online retailers.
3. Embrace on-site personalization techniques to make it easier for your website visitors to find exactly what they are looking for. It goes far beyond sorting products by newness or recent activity, of course. Tailor your messaging based on your users’ physical location or change your homepage layout and navigation based on visitor interests.
4. Big data analyses should help you come up with the ideas to improve user experience for better conversions.

III. Building Trust With Your Shoppers Paving Their Way to Checkout

When a potential buyer makes it into your website, it feels like all is done and dusted. However, you and I know it’s too early to celebrate our glory—you’ll still have to instill all your charisma, intuition and communication superpowers to keep your shoppers engaged. In the hopes of avoiding the dreaded “abandoned shopping cart”, you should give your shoppers the same feeling you would like to see yourself as a customer. There are a couple of ways to put it into practice:

1. Remove all sorts of distractions including flashing pop-ups and unwanted ads, or keep them to the very minimum not to alienate your shoppers on their way to checkout.
2. Stop auto-playing videos as this is what irritates users and only encourages them to click away from your website.
3. Make sure your payment processing tools support multiple currencies and allow for smooth checkout.
4. Stick security badges and trust seals, such as PCI-DSS certified label or a Trusted Shop certificate, on your home and checkout pages. Install SSL certificate to make sure the data passed between the web server and browser remain private. Your users should feel (and, what’s more important, be!) safe shopping online.
5. Be consistent across your website and channels you use to sell your products or services online. Since brand experience is the sum of all the sensations and thoughts, and reactions that individuals have in response to a brand, you have to make sure your website visitors feel good at each step of the funnel.
6. Avoid pricing manipulation like a plague. Though some may claim it’s a great marketing tactic, modern users are more attracted by the quality of the products rather than the prospects of a lower price, especially when it comes to buying car parts online.

IV. Preserving Credibility After Purchase

Would you like to hear something very technical, yet easy to follow? Pro tip: You should not stop nurturing your newly-qualified customers once you get them to the end of your sales funnel—put that in your pipe and smoke it. Even when the purchase is made and your drone is on the way to your shoppers’ porch, you still have many chances to delight your customers even more. You can pull it off in a number of different ways:

1. Never underestimate the power of packaging. There has been a growing movement towards eco-friendly packaging materials, so replacing plastic with bioplastic or paper will surely increase your chances to retain your customers.
2. Subscriptions is another effective strategy that you can use to retain shoppers, and trust is at the heart of this business model.
3. With the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic, expedient (same-day or next-day) delivery has become a global trend that pushed online retailers towards the much-awaited changes. Consumers want quick, easy and accessible products straight to their door. You, as a business owner, should react quickly and keep pace with changing demands.

Pro tip: Get ready for the potential supply chain issues well in advance. The shipping problems are predicted to stay here in 2022 and on.

To Sum Up

Building trust doesn’t just happen overnight. To build credibility with your potential and existing shoppers, you have to be consistent in your messaging across all channels, clearly understand your buyer personas, and stick to your word. Only then will you become the go-to provider in your niche.
For all that to happen, your website needs to be built in a secure and easily customizable eCommerce platform. Choose a solution that enables you to grow your brand, your business and your sales. Learn more about X-Cart.