Building Trust With E-commerce Shoppers Is All About Emotions and Trust

Customer trust is probably the biggest factor that can set your business up for success. However, winning the trust of your customers is generally easier said than done. Especially if you're a new entrant in the market, building credibility can be quite challenging.

Fortunately, or unfortunately for ecommerce businesses, your website is the single biggest weapon you can use to gain customer trust. However, there are many tried and tested ways in which you can tweak your website that send out trust signals.

Here are a few ways in which you can build trust with new customers to your online store.

1. Connect on an emotional level.

Have you ever met someone whom you didn't find too agreeable? Would you trust such a person? Obviously not. Believe it or not, the same thing applies to all of our interactions. Even our online shopping experiences.

If I land on an ecommerce store that I don't like, it's quite natural that I won't buy from them. As an ecommerce business, your main focus should be to get your potential customers to like you. If they do so, they will start trusting you and eventually buy from you.

The first step towards this is to avoid using technical jargons on your copy. Instead, create copy and product descriptions that people can relate to. Your content should connect with them at an emotional level. Only then will they start trusting you.

2. Flaunt your reviews and testimonials.

Testimonials and reviews reinforce the fact that people have found your products valuable. In other words, your ecommerce store can be trusted. You are worth spending money on.

Studies have revealed that 55 percent of consumers look up product reviews online before buying. So make sure to display your customer testimonials and reviews prominently on your website.

3. Display your trust badges.

Like I said earlier, your first step towards establishing trust should be to get customers to like you. For an ecommerce store, it means liking your content.

Compelling product descriptions, high-quality images, reviews, and testimonials are great at getting people to like and trust you. However, getting them to actually trust you with their credit card information is another thing altogether.

19 percent of online shoppers ditch their carts because they don't trust a site with their payment information. So display your trust badges, payment provider logos, and SSL certificates. These are powerful indicators that your customers' payment information will be encrypted and processed safely.

4. Display shipping costs upfront.

I've come across numerous ecommerce websites that do not display the extra costs like shipping on their product pages. As a result, nothing prepares me for the surprise waiting for me on their checkout page.

Even if I've decided to buy something, when I see the additional costs at checkout, I get easily discouraged. Especially, knowing that Amazon most certainly might give me the same product at zero shipping costs.

It's not like people are not willing to pay for shipping. It's just that when you only see those costs on the checkout page, it puts you off. 23 percent of people abandon their shopping carts just because they didn't know the extra costs upfront.

In order to gain customer trust, make sure to display all additional costs on the product page. If there's a certain amount that qualifies them to avail free shipping, mention it clearly. You can even display the entire cart contents including all costs whenever someone adds a product to cart.