Do You Need Trust Badges for an E-commerce Business?

The famous Hilary H. Ziglar once said:

If people like you, they will listen to you, but if people trust you, they will do business with you.

When it comes to e-commerce business, this kind of trust is paramount. It’s a key brand differentiator that can greatly impact business performance. It’s also critical to a company’s public reputation and long-term sustainability.

When customers and prospects visit an e-commerce site, they want to feel that their money and personal information is safe. Because if this information is not safeguarded, it can end up in the wrong hands, and eventually make them victims of cybercrime.

To keep their customers at ease, brands use trust seals or trust badges.

But do you really need a trust badge for your e-commerce site? Will customers feel at ease handing over sensitive information to you by virtue of trust badges? Read on to discover.

What is a Trust Badge?

If customers don’t trust you or your website, they will certainly not buy from you. To increase trust and credibility in their websites and brands, most e-commerce businesses include a trust seal on their website.

This trust badge, also known as trust seal is a badge or an emblem granted by a third-party trust company and displayed on an e-commerce website. It identifies that the website that displays the seal is legit.

In other words, a trust badge validates that a third-party trust company has collected your company info and verified the authenticity of your business.

Typically, trust badges for e-commerce are granted by security companies such as Norton, McAfee, TRUSTe, or reputable business rating organizations such as Better Business Bureau. These badges are usually associated with secure socket layer (SSL), which ensures there is a secure transmission for customers to safely enter their credit card details.

Do You Need a Trust Badge for Your E-commerce Website?

The answer is Yes.

You need a trust badge to earn the trust of prospects and existing customers. Multiple studies have found a direct link between trust seals and increased conversions.

One study was conducted by Blue Fountain Media – a New York-based digital marketing agency. In the study, the company replaced a standard privacy policy with a Verisign trust badge.

The result? The company reported a 42% increase in sales for the page that contained the Verisign trust badge.

In another study, Virtual Sheet Music – a company that produces sheet music for guitar withdrew the Verisign trust seal due to contractual disagreement and experienced a significant decline in sales. Upon reinstalling the trust badge, the company reported a whopping 31% increase in conversions.

With staggering statistics like these ones, it’s hard to present a case against the impact of trust badges on e-commerce sites.

It’s clear that customers prefer to shop on sites that offer a 100% financial protection guarantee. And trust badges happen to offer precisely that. So if you have an e-commerce store and are yet to include a trust badge, you’re losing a lot to the competition.

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