5 Ways to Establish Trust on e-Commerce Sites

These days, consumers trust their peers more than branded content. They look to the recommendations, reviews, and experiences of their fellow shoppers before buying online.  

To win over customers and ensure the success of your eCommerce store, you need to establish and maintain trust through web design in West Palm Beach.  

But how exactly can you make your customers trust you more like they trust their friends and family?

In a world where consumers are getting savvier and more cynical about their purchase decisions, there are several steps you can take to humanize your business and facilitate trust in your eCommerce site or app.

Trust is the First Principle of Conversion

According to Alex O’Byrne, co-founder of Shopify Plus Experts, We Make Websites, trust is the first principle of conversion.  

But building trust is challenging, especially now that consumers look towards their peers for assessment and commentary.  

Some people can leave false reviews and this can soil the recommendations your customers see online. This can impact your reputation and drive potential customers away.  

To combat false negative reviews, it's important to respond to them respectfully and appropriately, politely draw attention to the fake reviews with specific facts, and ask the reviewer to delete a fake review.  

Aside from negative reviews, the other dangers of web-based interactions can prevent people from trusting you.  

To help them overcome their suspicions and worries, your web design in West Palm Beach should emanate trustworthiness, confidence, and credibility to encourage visitors to convert.  

5 Ways to Facilitate Trust on Your eCommerce Site

1. Make a Good First Impression

Trust begins with making a good first impression. People's first impressions can have a lasting impact on how they see your business and dictate whether or not they would want to buy from you in the future.  

94% of first impressions come from your site’s web design in West Palm Beach. 75% of your website’s credibility also comes from design.  

If you want to make a positive first impression and build credibility, your website needs to be visually appealing, functional and optimized for mobile.  

You want to impress your audience the moment they land on your site with a fast loading time. You want to capture their attention with beautiful and relevant imagery.  

You also want to engage them with introductory videos and gamification. Aside from these, here are the other keys to making a good first impression on your site.  

• Create a strong brand identity with consistent branding. This means making sure that your logo, color scheme, and iconography remain consistent. The same is true for your brand voice, aesthetics, tone, and value proposition.  
• Optimize your CTA by making your offers clear, addressing any potential objections right away, and putting them in a highly visible location.  

• Your navigation buttons should be clear and simple so users can explore your website and its content intuitively.  
• Use a clean web design in West Palm Beach so your content is easily scannable and digestible.  
• Leverage storytelling to connect with your audience and deliver emotional impact.  
• Show off your products with high-quality visuals. Take lots of angles of the products so visitors can have a closer look at your items.  
• Make your product descriptions short but concise. It should contain all the necessary information about your items.  

• Optimize your website for mobile because 54.4% of all website traffic comes from mobile devices. Mobile-optimized websites tend to load faster too, which will make users happy.  

2. Feature Trust Signals

What better way to impress web visitors and convince them to buy from a smaller business than to showcase your accolades, third-party reviews, security seals, physical location on your contact page, and other forms of trust signals?  

When you invest in a professional and well-thought-out website, people's instincts will tell them that you're legit. But when your website looks sketchy, uses blurry images, and has a grammatically wrong copy, they won’t hesitate to hit the exit button.  

Right now, consumers trust more what their peers have to say than branded content. Make sure you leverage customer reviews, ratings, and recent press to convince visitors that your business is the real deal.  

Another thing you want to remember is that the more transparent you are (this includes the attribution of stock photos or the source of your statistics or infographic), the more people are likely to see you as legitimate.  

3. Ensure a Safe and Secure Shopping Experience

One-third of consumers refrain from buying online because they're afraid that their credit card information might be compromised.  

Make your customers’ shopping experience safe and secure by taking the necessary steps to prevent hackers from stealing customer data. It only takes one mistake to ruin your eCommerce shop.  

The moment your customers' data gets stolen, you can be held liable for any losses they incur and other damages beyond the losses.  

A hacker can also extort you by locking your site and encrypting files unless you pay a ransom.  

So, protecting your site and your customers is a must. Here’s how to get started:

• Build your website or eCommerce store on a secure platform.  
• Use plugins and add-ons to help minimize spam, control user comments, back up your site, and many more. Keep them updated.  
• Adopt HTTPS to keep your site safe.  

• Use a secure third-party payment gateway to be able to accommodate multiple payment methods from your customers without having to store their credit card and payment information once the transaction is completed. This protects your customer's data and you by minimizing risks from outside attacks.
• Make your policies and communication as transparent as possible by keeping your returns and refund policy clear and simple to understand. You also want to add a place for people to write reviews and rank products.  

4. Show Empathy In Your User Experience

The best way to gain trust is by making users feel like you understand their pain points, needs, and preferences.  

You can do this by offering helpful tutorials, an easy-to-find FAQ page, help docs, post-purchase content, providing self-service options, and optimizing the micro-interaction elements of your West Palm Beach web design.

Micro-interaction refers to elements that allow users to accomplish a single task or inform them that a task has been successfully done. It's important to make these tiniest interactions memorable and fun.  

It humanizes your user's experience and makes their interactions feel natural.  

If your website repeatedly asks a customer to provide the same information they’ve already submitted in the past, doesn’t communicate if an action has been completed successfully, and doesn’t allow them to undo errors, you're not being empathetic to your web visitors.  

Empathy is essential for a positive user experience. And, a positive user experience is crucial for building customer trust.  

5. Build Trust Through Usability, Accessibility, and Inclusion

When designing your eCommerce store or website, it’s important to have usability, accessibility, and inclusion in mind.  

Remember, users will only trust and use systems they understand. So, how exactly can you facilitate usability, accessibility, and inclusion on your site?

• Do user research.
• Offer translation options.
• Minimize technical jargon.

• Use a content management system that supports accessibility.  
• Include descriptive alt text for images.
• Give your links descriptive names.  
• Be mindful of color contrasts.  
• Design your forms for accessibility. Avoid putting them too close to each other.  

• Understand how people with disabilities navigate, access, and experience the web so you can optimize your web design in West Palm Beach according to their needs.  
• Understand the barriers that prevent people from accessing and using your site equally.
• Do an accessibility audit to see what you can do to improve your site.  
• Create more accessible content by making sure they’re not complex or poorly structured.  
• Give users freedom and control to go about your site the way they want to.  

• Make your messaging clear. Tell users exactly what’s wrong and what they can do to fix it.  

Users are more likely to trust your site if you help them accomplish their goals. If a user has difficulty using your site because they’re disabled, they’ll feel a loss of trust in your business.  

Make sure you understand all users and plan out your web design in West Palm Beach properly. Ask for feedback and make accessibility, usability, and inclusion a part of your development.  

Is Your Web Design in West Palm Beach Professional, Reliable, and Trustworthy?

To get consumers to buy from you, they need to feel confident in doing business with you first.  

By having a professional, secure, empathetic, and accessible web design in West Palm Beach, you can build trust and convince consumers to buy.  

At Digital Resource, our web designers in West Palm Beach will work with you to create a customized web user experience that builds trust and wows users at every step of the buyer’s journey.  

Are you struggling to make your website more trustworthy? We can help! Contact us today for a free consultation.  

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