Having a professional-looking, fully functional ecommerce website is one way you build credibility with potential online shoppers. Just as in the bricks-and-mortar store, you must win your customers' trust before they'll shop online. You need to let your site visitors get to know you and your company as well as learn about your products before they'll start shopping online. How does a bricks-and-mortar retailer build credibility with their customers and how can we do it on the 'Net?
4) The 'traditional' retailer makes her store as attractive as possible, and displays the product to best advantage.
People shopping online need to see the product before they'll purchase it, too; incorporating an online catalogue into your ecommerce website design can really help build credibility. But don't make the mistake of loading many pictures onto too few pages, resulting in pages that load too slowly and don't provide enough information. A good online catalogue will use a lot of web pages; it will be organized into categories, searchable, use thumbnails to give faster load times, and provide detailed information on each product. An excellent catalogue also provides stock information and makes it easy for the online shopper to purchase the product.
5) The retailer (or members of her staff) is physically present in the store to welcome, communicate with, and serve the customers that come into the store.
Too many ecommerce websites are anonymous and provide very limited contact opportunities for people thinking of shopping online, a real blow to their credibility. If I'm thinking of buying your product, I want to know who you are.
Successful ecommerce sites provide real names as contacts, not pseudonyms such as 'webmaster' or worse, names that look like passwords, such as 'King1724'. They supply information about their staff and their company that the online shopper can access easily. Build credibility by putting a picture of yourself and/or your staff on your ecommerce website. Customers need to have the feeling that they know you, or at least that they know something about you, before they'll do any online shopping.
Successful ecommerce websites also provide information about customer service and contact information that is clear and accessible. Having to drill down through 50 pages to find an email address printed in a tiny font on the bottom of a page will give your potential online shopper queasy feelings, not good feelings. Most won't even bother to search. They'll just assume that you're not the sort of person they want to do business with.
Build credibility with potential customers by making your customer service information a prominent feature of your site. Put an 'About Us' and a 'Contact Us' or 'Customer Service' link on your ecommerce website's navigation menu and make sure it's on every page.
And write those pages; if someone bothers to click on 'Customer Service' and all they see is a single email address, your credibility will plummet. Online shoppers need to see a fully developed customer service policy to feel comfortable about online shopping. Many ecommerce websites use FAQs which provides answers to common questions, such as how to order, shipping charges, and return policies.
And no matter how small your ecommerce website is, you can now provide customer service in real time. HumanClick and LiveHelper, for example, are both Internet based customer service applications that let your ecommerce website visitors get immediate, on-demand help. Now there's a way to entice ecommerce visitors!
Lastly, if you want to get visitors to your ecommerce website shopping online, you need to make it easy and safe for them to pay for their purchases online. Continue on to the next page to read more about ecommerce payment processing.
