Trust in ecommerce (What Is It?

A research paper from McMaster University provides a working definition of trust, stating that
trust is ‘the willingness to depend on an exchanging partner in whom one has confidence.’
Trust in ecommerce is slightly different than our normal understanding of trust though.
Consider a business transaction at a brick and mortar location. You’ve seen the store before,
and you recognize the name. Inside a person greets and assists you with your purchase. After
paying, you leave the store with a real, physical good.
An eCommerce purchase is vastly different. You may not know the business reputation,
location, contact information, or the owner. You don’t know their intentions, or whether or not
the product will actually reach you. Due to the intangible nature of ecommerce, it is much more
difficult to gain and maintain trust in your brand.
In the eCommerce industry, there are normally 3 distinct ‘players’ in the trust category. These
are visitors, those who enter and browse the site; vendors, those who are selling products and
host the website; and referees, 3rd party resources that help set industry standards and
recognize organizations that meet those standards.
Being Trustworthy (How To Get It)
There are a number of steps you can take to build consumer trust. These range from web
design principles to marketing communication. If you want to gain trust with your consumers,
don’t negate some of these concepts:

Follow Industry Standards and Best Practices

When you search a term on Google, you expect a relevant list of results to be displayed. If that
doesn’t happen, you become frustrated and lose a bit of confidence in the search capabilities.
This is the same with an eCommerce store – when customers don’t have access to features
they’re accustomed to, they lose trust and confidence in the brand.

Don’t Forget Design

People are more likely to trust a website that is visually appealing. It’s human nature.
Conversional has a fantastic study and article explaining this concept in action. Visitors judge
the ‘beauty’ of your website in just milliseconds.
When participants of the study were asked about why they didn’t trust a website, 94% of the
provided reasons were design related. If you do nothing else to build trust, try giving your
website a facelift!
Use the Power of People
Word of mouth marketing and customer testimonials are among the most powerful sales
tools you have access to, don’t neglect them! The study emphasizes how effective testimonials
are in getting customers to enter credit card information, particularly for high priced items.

Solidify the Relationship

Online fraud of financial and personal information is one of the major reasons people are
reluctant to buy online. Offline shopping precludes giving out personal and financial
information in many cases. Since eCommerce precludes live and verbal social communication,
your customers may never get to interact with you personally. Therefore, the need to establish
trust is higher in eCommerce.
Trust Tactics (How To Improve It)
You need to work at maintaining the trust of existing customers, while increasing your
trustworthiness to new visitors. We have a few resources that can help those of you who are in
this ‘maintenance’ stage.

Empower People with Information

Some people place different emphasis on different sources of trust. In fact, some people even
place different emphasis on different aspects of trust sources. For example, it turns out not all
trust seals are created equally. Norton dominates the security seal rankings, but combinations
of multiple seals can add even more.
If you want to test all of this yourself, spend some time navigating through your favorite eCommerce

websites and you’ll be sure to find those you trust more than others. Pay attention to factors influencing

that trust – they’ll likely have been discussed in the aforementioned points.

Invest in Trust Seals

However, reviews and testimonials are not 100% guaranteed to build trust between you and
your customer. Once a potential buyer has read and heard all word-of-mouth and first-hand
reviews, there may still be a gap in his/her mind before they choose to buy from your store. A
significant percentage of online shoppers (70%) refuse to continue with their online transaction
because they did not trust the transaction. 53% also say that if there was a seal present, they
wouldn’t have canceled the transaction.
Conclusion
Trust influences a consumer's decision to visit your site, buy your product,
return to the site, and even promote your brand. Sometimes customers
themselves become brand ambassadors of products because of the benefits
they have received and the faith they have gained in the business. Without trust,
visitors will simply drift away to competitors and choose other options. It doesn't
take much long for the visitor to lose attention, but a lot for the vendor to gain and
retain it. So ensure that you are investing wisely in building trustworthy
relationships.