6 Highly Effective Ways to Generate Trust in Your Ecommerce Site

A staggering 81% of shoppers are concerned when shopping on an unfamiliar website. They are thus less likely to convert — unless you’re able to somehow generate trust. 

Trust is not one universal concept. In an ecommerce world, it can be broken down into transactional, informational, psychological, and social trust. Your potential customers will want to know that their chosen payment method is safe, that you won’t abuse their personal information, that the products you sell are legitimate, and that you are who you say you are. 

Here are six highly effective ways to use your ecommerce website to generate trust, even with first-time visitors. 

Don’t Limit Reviews to Product Pages

Social proof is an exceptionally effective way to generate some practically instant trust. It serves to demonstrate that your services or products are of high quality, as other people have already used them. 

There are numerous forms of social proof:

• Customer photos or videos
• Customer logos 
• Case studies 
• Reviews and product ratings
• Third-party reviews
• Number of social media followers
• Celebrity or influencer endorsements
• Client and customer testimonials

Most brands will, naturally, add social proof to their product pages. Customer photos and reviews serve to highlight certain aspects of the product and to demonstrate its value. They are a great conversion-boosting tool. 

However, what happens when potential customers never reach your product page? What if they land on your homepage, aren’t convinced they can trust you, and choose to leave? 

By omitting social proof, particularly product reviews, from your homepage, you are failing to capitalize on the simplest possible tactic to generate trust. You already have the reviews. All you need to do is display them on the homepage.

While you can also add product carousels to your homepage, this tactic is limited. It will raise trust in certain products, or it will fail to spark enough interest in customers who are looking for something else. 

A better approach is to float a Reviews button on the homepage. Take a look at ShopSolarKits as an example. They have a sticky button on the left side of the screen, and it is essentially an amalgamation of all of their customer reviews. They can be filtered, they come with a quality and ease of use metric, and they show you exactly which product the reviewer is talking about. 

Source: Shopsolarkits.com

Put Serious Effort Into Your Content Marketing

Content marketing is a singularly effective marketing tactic with a bunch of benefits. It: 

• generates traffic and backlinks
• boosts brand awareness
• can be leveraged for social and email campaigns
• generate trust as you position as a proven authority

The more effort you pour into it, the higher dividends it will pay. From a credibility perspective, your aim is to generate trust as you reassure your readers (who also happen to be potential customers) that you speak with authority. 

If you are able to demonstrate your expertise and experience, you will reassure them that your products are what you claim they are and that they can actually solve their pain points.

This means your content needs to be well-researched, well-written, and in line with your brand voice. More importantly, it needs to provide the information your audience is actually looking for. You should also do whatever you can to highlight the knowledgeability of your writers. Anyone can write anything on the internet, so how are your readers to know your staff is to be trusted? 

Author biographies are an often underutilized and underrated aspect of content marketing. Take a look at this mattress guide. It clearly tells you that it has been written by a certified sleep coach and reviewed by a medical expert. The information it contains is thus instantly more relevant and generates trust. 

The user interface of this bio element is also to be applauded. First, it’s located at the top of the page, as opposed to the bottom, where no one will see it. The elements are also clickable and come with a pop-up revealing additional information about the author and reviewer. 

Source: Eachnight.com

Make Product Filtering Convenient and Logical

Product category pages are also an absolute nightmare for customers. The bigger your ecommerce store, the higher the chances they will consider finding the right product a hassle. 

Unfortunately, there is no way to avoid them. The best you can do is ensure that product filtering is convenient, logical, and intuitive as much as possible. 

The best way to approach the problem is to consider both the needs of your audience and the products themselves. How can you best categorize them? What do some of them have in common that sets them apart from others? 

Price, size, color, and brand are among the most common and most useful filters you can choose. Depending on the niche of your store, you should also consider adding other filters based on what your audience needs. 

Let’s take a look at the way Anytime Baseball lets you filter their pitching machines. Other than the obvious brand and type filters, there’s also one that lets you choose a different type of machine, but you can also choose the age of the pitcher in question and ensure you find a product that matches their needs. If you know nothing about pitching machines, this filter is a dream come true.  

These intelligent filtering fields prove to the brand’s customers that they take them very seriously and that their goal is to make the shopping experience as easy and pleasant as possible. Instant trust. 

Source: Anytimebaseballsupply.com

Educate Your Customers

Let’s quickly look at another way you should be utilizing your blogging and content-writing efforts. 

Apart from ensuring that they are written by verifiable experts, especially in niches where that is relevant (looking at you, YMYL), you should also aim to tie them in with your products as much as possible. 

Remember that the goal of blogging for business is to ultimately end up making a sale. While you certainly need to provide different types of content for every stage of the customer journey, you should look to create educational, perhaps even top-of-the-funnel content that references one (or more) of your products.

Let’s look at an example. Lush sells several magnesium massage bars. They describe the benefits of using the product and tell you what it can help you with. They keep this section of the page short, aiming to generate trust , not to overwhelm a casual shopper. 

However, they’ve taken the time to create a much more detailed post about the benefits of magnesium for the skin. The in-depth post is more likely to rank and get them qualified traffic. 

Creating these kinds of posts helps to generate trust by showing your audience that you care about them, are not trying to push a sale on them, and care about them actually solving a problem. 

Source: Lush.com

Provide Varied Payment Options

Arguably the most tricky element of the relationship your customers have with you as an online store is the transaction itself. Consumers are well-aware of the number of scammers out there. They know you may use their payment information to steal money from them. You needs to generate trust, as they know you can be up to all kinds of no good. 

This is why one of the basic lessons everyone teaches their grandparents who are looking to shop online is this: always make sure there are various payment methods available, and make sure they are verifiable. 

The more legitimate payment methods you have and the more clearly you display them, the more trustworthy you will be. 

There is also a bonus available for you: Afterpay. It is inherently trusted by most shoppers, and it’s a great way to also help them afford a product they really want. If you have it on your website, you will overcome a lot of the most common transactional conversion obstacles.

Add to that PayPal, GPay, and AmazonPay, which promote express checkout, and the standard credit card option, and you’ll be all set. 

Here’s Bando with all of these options. They have implemented Afterpay, and their checkout process is simple and effective. Everything about it is understated, but it works, and it gives you plenty of trust signals. 

Source: Bando.com

Help Them Make the Right Choice

Adding value to your product pages is another way to prove to your audience that you care about them, and not just about making a sale. Ensuring your product descriptions are useful and aiming to help potential customers make a choice between two similar products is a great way to achieve this. 

Just like you should make your filtering intuitive and user-oriented, the information you list about each product should take into account what your audience might need from it. 

Let’s take a look at Bellroy and one of their product pages. They provide design insights that will help a customer instantly decide if the product is right for them. They give you its size, but more importantly, they provide a size comparison tool that shows you how their wallet compares to the size of phones, bills, or credit cards.

You also learn how many cards it can hold, where they can be placed, and how you can organize your wallet for ease of access. 

It may seem like the simplest thing in the world, but you won’t believe how many stores fail to be useful, thinking that all they need is an image and a witty product description. 

Source: Bellroy.com

Wrapping Up 

All of these tactics are a great way to generate trust and establish yourself as a credible, legitimate, honest business. They also work very well in synergy, so you can literally use all of them, regardless of your niche or industry. You will just need to slightly adapt each to match your overall goals and marketing style.