Trust Matters more than Discounts
Nowadays e-commerce companies are running blindly towards giving more and more discounts for acquiring more and more customers .Especially in developing countries where still E-commerce companies are fighting for monopoly .
Even in race of giving more discounts, many times they fake discounts by inflating MRP and when they get caught red handed in this ,they lose trust of customers .
Trust of customer is far more important than lucrative discounts because customer cannot inspect the product by touch n feel. Moreover in many cases they need to pay upfront .If you are new e-commerce company and not famous in your target audience ,customer may worry about your authenticity. So building trust in the customers is more important than anything else.
How to increase trust factor of your E-commerce site :
1) Clearly Visible Contact Information : Your contact information must be clearly visible . Buyer must find it very quickly in less than 3 secs , as soon as they visit the site. To prove your authenticity to the customer, this serves as a big tool.
Where to put contact information on the page :
- a) Slim header at top of home page : You can provide the phone number as the point of contact at the top slim header . For example you can check our store.webkul.com ,we used a slim header and have the contact information visible to the visitors or the customers.
- b)Footer : You must have complete detail of your company name , address , Vat number, phone number etc at the footer of the home page
- c) About us Page : You must have an about us page on the website . With complete detail of your company , top leadership , mission , vision , what unique in you , google map etc .
2) Loading time : Site loading time play very crucial role in your E-commerce business success or failure . Good loading time not only increase trust factor but also help in many other way like – SEO, high conversion rate , better experience on mobile etc . We will discuss about other benefits in other blogs . This time lets see it only in context of trust factor. When a new customer open your site and if it takes too long to open , customer starts doubting your technical and financial capabilities .Try to reduce your first loading time to less than 5 sec and any thing more than 10 sec is fatal for your E-commerce business.
3) Design : UI and UX of site must be at par of industry standard . In today’s world, where after every six months we are experiencing new better web standard for UI and UX , make sure your designing team keeps updating your site with latest better trend . If your site look like old schools, no new customer is going to buy from you. One most important thing is, that your site must be mobile ready . If your site is creepy on mobile you are losing 50% of your customer and this trend will go up in future . Moreover now google give more priority to mobile ready sites on mobile search result.
4)High Quality Product Images and Accurate Product Specification : Your website must have good quality product images, as it might help in attracting more and more customers. The product detail page must have a complete and genuine product specification, as when wrong information is published then it can lead to more returns.
5) Live chat option : To prove the authenticity and to serve the customer better, most of the people in e-commerce industry have live chat on the website just to add to the genuineness of the company and the products.
6)Fast responses on email /phone/live chat : Faster replies ensures a positiveness in customer’s mind about post sale support . If number of queries are high , you should make a certain timeline by which you should reply to the customer and the same time be informed to the customer. In this case the customer would be knowing when to expect the reply.
7)User testimonial & reviews : The user providing reviews and testimonials, must have their social account user link (like linkedin , facebook , twitter etc) on the website next to the review. This will help increase the brand loyalty and authenticity of review . User video can be an awesome plus for your site
8) Secure payment transaction : Still people think twice before paying online due to various stories about credit card fraud etc . Mode of payment must be safe and secure. Design your site such that Visitors must feel secure right from landing page to order confirmation page .
- a)SSL Certificate : Your website must have SSL certificate . Now normal buyer also aware that https is more secure than http . So don’t compromise on this . Even now SSL is good for SEO factor also.
- b) Only use secure and trusted payment methods like paypal, stripe etc
- c) Trustmarks : Put as much trustmark /certification as you can, like versign certified , Mcafee certification to ensure customer that payment on the site is secure and free from any virus or malware.
9) Smother Shipping Experience : Two big problem of E-commerce industry are payment & shipping . Retail had advantage in both areas .So if you are able to make your customer realize, that payment is as safer as retail and shipping is as faster as retail then you would definitely win the market .For payment you can implement point 8 .For shipping make sure that after every order, customer must know the most approximate delivery date. In case, there is any delay you must inform customer in advance .
Implement above 9 points and you will definitely have much more conversion rate and better loyal customers . Let me know your opinion in comments section below .
Have a Nice Selling .