If you aim to establish your site as a serious ecommerce
player, here are 3 things you need to do:
1. Create and put up a privacy policy.
2. Process orders on a secure server.
3. Get 3rd party verification to increase credibility. Each
is easy to do - but many ecommerce newbies underestimate
their importance.
These 3 elements are important because they help build
trust at the most critical point of the visit -at the point
where the visitor is about to complete a checkout and
convert into a customer.
1. Create and put up a privacy policy
If you don't have a good online privacy policy, it's time
to get to work! Clear and easy to read privacy policies are
essential in building customer trust. They essentially tell
the customers what you will do with their information. A
good privacy policy will therefore calm any customer fears
in that area.
A lot of visitors read the privacy policy in detail before
they decide to submit any of their information.
If you want to be considered a credible online business, an
excellent privacy policy is a definite must. Some of the
interesting findings of the a survey of internet users and
trust by Stanford University include:
· Americans appear to place greater trust in sites
that provide valid content and respect privacy than their
European counterparts. Americans gave much higher
credibility rankings to websites that offered privacy
statements, sent emails to confirm transactions, indicated
the source of site content or provided credentials for its
authors.
· Women attached greater credibility to websites
with privacy policies, email confirmations of transactions
and contact phone numbers than men. Notice the emphasis on
privacy policy? Web users are getting more and more
concerned with privacy and many will refrain from buying
anything from a website unless a privacy policy is stated.
If you don't have one, here's how to create one in 20
minutes. Just visit the Direct Marketing Association's
website and fill in the form to have a privacy policy
customized for you. Privacy policies should be clearly
stated and conspicuously posted. We recommend that you link
to one in your footer. You might also want to test the
effect of linking to your privacy policy at the bottom of
your sign up form such as in the example below.
2. Allow secure ordering
We used to run a site that offered customers only one way
to order - PayPal. PayPal has a trusted name and allows
credit card and echeck transactions. Morever, millions of
Americans have PayPal accounts. So is PayPal enough? As an
experiment we offered credit card processing on our own
secure server in addition to PayPal. We were astonished by
a whopping 20% increase in sales!
The conclusion: If you're just starting out and offer only
Paypal as a quick and easy payment system - get a merchant
service and a secure server ASAP.
A merchant service is an online credit card processing
facility. You can sign up for a merchant service through a
variety of different companies. The largest is
Authorize.net, But you can't approach them directly, you'll
need to go through a reseller of their service.
We use e-online data. They are a reputable Authorize.net
reseller and we've been very satisfied with them.
Once you get a merchant service, you need to set up a
shopping cart software that can process credit cards and is
compatible with your merchant service. (Most shopping cart
software programs that are sold or open source are
compatible with Authorize.net.
To protect your customer's sensitive credit card
information you need to run your shopping cart software on
a secure server.
A secure server is recognizable by the fact that domain
names running on it start with https rather than http. To
set up a secure server, you need to buy a secure server
certificate and install it on your server. Don't let
the technicalities of this bother you. Your web hosting
company should be able to do this for you. You can purchase
a low cost secure server certificate from Free SSL.
A secure server requires a little bit more of an
explanation. A secure server runs on a technology called
SSL. Basically SSL is a protocol that encrypts any
communication between a server and a client. The
communication is therefore not readable for anyone outside
this relationship. It's secure.
Use 3rd-Party Verification
A very effective way of convincing your visitors of your
credibility and top-end security policy is by having
outside independent entities vouch for you. You can show
this on your website through seals of approval from these
organizations.
Outside reinforcement will convince your visitors that you
have put in an effort to earn their trust. Research into
approval seals shows that online business that do use this
method of reinforcement have higher conversion rates, lower
shopping cart abandonment and a higher amount of loyal
customers.
Well-established providers of approval seals include:
· Truste (focus on privacy issues)
· ValidateSite (focus on accurate corporate
information)
· Thawte (focus on security)
· BBBOnline (focus on handling of complaints)
· Bizrate.com (gathers and shows ratings of users)
If no vulnerabilities are found, the site is marked with a
hacker-safe certification seal.
----------------------------------------------------
Bjorn Brands is a successfull enterprenuer who transitioned
from having his own building company to a great online
business. Check out his site and see for yourself how he
can help you do the same at http://www.moneyacces.com
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