Website and Ecommerce credibility logos
How do I get people to trust my website?
One of the most important things on the internet if you actually want someone to pay you, is trust. On all the major websites, especially the ecommerce websites you will find various logos from different third party vendors that show that the website operates their business fairly, protects consumers information, stores the data in the correct way, and are verified to be who they say they are. For merchants considering these logos its hard to put an exact dollar value on what its worth to establish the trust factor, but many of the vendors of these logos claim conversions go up 5-30%.
Here’s a rundown of all the major vendors out there and if you find any more you are welcome to send an email to steve at yadayadamarketing.com and fill me in on any new ones you found and share any results you had with using these logos.
BBB is probably the oldest and most well known among consumers. BBB has been around since 1912. They are not all that online saavy yet, but in many niches I am finding that the BBB is one of the most important logos that you can have on your site. We’re currently rated A minus by the BBB. For a marketing company, thats pretty darn good.
Some of these other logos below can be pretty pricey, but these are the most trusted logos on the internet, and not only will help conversions, they will go far if you ever get a human review from adwords. These are the logos you see on all the big sites, especially the big ecommerce sites, because trust is really a big issue if you are going to hand over your credit card to someone on the internet.
http://www.bbb.org/us/ BBB is the biggest as mentioned earlier
http://www.truste.com Truste basically stands for that you protect your consumers data and don’t share their information
http://www.mcafeesecure.com/ Expensive, but they make the “hacker safe” logo that you see on the bigger sites
http://www.geotrust.com/ssl/ssl-site-seals/ Shows that you encrypt and protect personal data of your customers
http://www.trust-guard.com/Privacy-Seals-s/77.htm These guys are not as well known, but their seals are cheaper. They also have http://www.trust-guard.com/Business-Seals-s/76.htm and another one for PCI compliance (covered below)
https://www.controlscan.com/index.php Deals with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard
more info at ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Compliance )
http://www.bizrate.com (this one is really more exclusive to ecommerce sites, as bizrate is a product comparison site)
http://www.thefind.com/ (this one isn’t a major one but its worth throwing in. Also more for ecommerce merchants)
http://www.resellerratings.com/
https://www.trustwave.com/
Some other inexpensive ideas:
Many people make their own “customer satisfaction seal” which links to their return policy or customer satisfaction guarantee page. This is free to do, and still looks good. Its worth doing on any site, even though you and I both know that it doesn’t really mean anything. It still helps to convey that feeling of trust and make your policies clear. And of course if you are actually serious about having a website, you should have a well written privacy policy, and terms of use. You do have these, don’t you?
Also, any publications you have been mentioned in or advertised in, you can generally use their logos as well. This is not to be construed as legal advice. You should have a competent attorney advise you on privacy policy, terms of use, and use of any logos on your site.
See http://old.yadayadamarketing.com/contact-us/ for how we have implemented this. The credibility we still get from it is huge.
Here’s one other to put into the mix which is aimed more at small business:
http://www.smallbusinesscommerceassociation.org
Everyone has to decide what is going to work from their budget, and of course the more dollars you do on the internet the more these logos make sense, because if the conversions increase as a percentage, its all the more powerful if those numbers are higher. But trust is also important for any website owner, no matter how small.
If you need help sorting all this out for your site, give us a call at 800-920-1985. We’ll be glad to help.