Today I am going to talk about Trust marks, Yes the “make your customer feel good” marks. Every online store uses trust marks, Best Buy, New Egg, Dicks sporting goods and many more. those are big name company’s and yet they still need to tell their customer that you can trust our cart. So what can you do? you can go to mcafee.com and buy their badge and that will be around $800 a year, I am not saying to not look into the Badge or VeriSign will run over $500 a year and most be name companies use both of them and it’s a good way to go if you have the funds but most of us don’t have the money to spend on that kind of trust a few options I would like to share with you are free and just take some time. If you run on a Yahoo Store then you have the “Yahoo Badge Program” that you can use, it has 3 badges both secure for your cart and not secure for your store (you don’t need to have secure images in the store) . Second option is to make your own badge or use on that is online for free, 2 of the images i have above are free online just do a Yahoo or Google search for “Secure Badge image” should find them, and my last source for the images is PayPal if you use it, PayPal has a Verified Badge like the one about plus they have a “we take PayPal” badge, ask any body that buys online and uses PayPal and they will tell you that when a merchant uses PayPal they feel safe to buy from you, Merchants that add PayPal to their site can see up to a 15% increase in sales, so if you have not do it!

Now that you have the badge for your store where do you add the image? well you need to add the image “above the fold” so that means anywhere that is above the lowest part of the page when a Person first loads the page and you need it on every page not just the home page. So in the header or above the left had navigation bar. Now I don’t want to see 5 trust marks all in the left navigation bar that is too much but one is fine and the rest on the Marks in the footer, for the shopping cart pages you should not have a left nav but you have space for it in a Yahoo! Store so add all your trust marks in that area all the way down as well as what kind of Credit cards you accept and you can get that at Credit Card Logos. Last item on my list, you are adding images to a secure cart and make sure that when you host the images that they are on a HTTPS server so that you don’t get any non-secure warring in Internet Explore and that will make your customers RUN!

1 Comment

• By Joseph A'Deo, June 16, 2010 @ 8:29 pm

  Thanks for mentioning VeriSign trust seals. They are, indeed, a great way for websites to foster trust between themselves and their customers, and thereby lead to better sales and fewer abandoned shopping carts (a third party study recently revealed that security anxieties account for a great of abandoned shopping carts, in fact). Just a note that if you use a third party shopping cart you can still benefit from the new VeriSign Trust Seal, which provides authentication and malware scanning without encryption. In order to compete online trust seals are absolutely essential.

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