Visible Contact Details It doesn’t pay to leave your ontact details conspicuously absent from your website. Nobody would rightly trust a website that takes online payments but doesn’t reveal any way for them to contact you. People want to be assured that they can reach you if anything goes wrong with the ordering process or if they have any questions.
The more accessible you are, the better the customer experience.
Describe Your Offer Accurately How you describe your products and services on your web pages is paramount to how successful your eCommerce website will be. Using the right language with your audience, as well as giving accurate descriptions will go a long way to establishing trust with your website visitors.
Have a Robust ‘About Us’ Page
Many websites don’t put much effort into their ‘About Us ‘page. This page describes the purpose of your business to your potential customers. Not every visitor will read this page, but Google certainly will and it can affect your rankings since the recent changes to Google’s algorithm. Having a well written ‘About Us’ page will also create trust with those visitors who are interested in who they are dealing with and may base their decision to do business with you based upon how you describe your business.
SSL Certificate with High Encryption If you take credit card payments, you should have an SSL certificate on your website. SSL certificates are applied to websites to secure web pages where a user’s personal details are shared. The certificate basically encrypts the user’s connection to the website so that third parties can’t read the information being submitted in a form. User’s can tell whether the page they are visiting is SSL secured by the padlock icon that appears in the bottom right corner of their browser. It also helps to represent this security feature prominently on your order pages to assure your customers.
Use a Trusted Credit Card Gateway To accept credit card details, you need a credit card processing gateway. Australian regulations prohibit businesses from storing credit card information on web servers. This is why payment gateways are required and their use takes the responsibility for the security of credit card details away from you. Most reputable banks offer payment gateways that integrate with your website’s ecommerce functionality so that visitors make their payment without leaving your website, while some payment gateways redirect the customer to another website to complete the transaction. Having your customers redirected away from your website to make a credit card payment is not very good practice, because it can confuse your customers and rouse suspicion that they are being scammed.
Clearly State Your Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy Both before and during the payment process, your customers should be able to easily access and view your terms and conditions and your privacy policy. This is generally required by most credit card gateways and even if most visitors don’t read these documents, it enhances your credibility to have them in place. Believe it or not, many people at least feel some assurance that their rights as a consumer are being protected and you are more legitimate by simply having terms and conditions and a privacy policy published and available online.
Use Secure Web Hosting Services If you host your business website on some flimsy server owned by a cheap web hosting provider, is it reliable and secure? If your website goes down regularly, how does this reflect on your business? It’s important to make sure that your website remains open for business 24 hours a day, otherwise you are losing traffic and dissuading otherwise loyal customers from doing business with you. Your web host provider should also be
protecting your server from hackers who have the potential to do all kinds of damage to your online business. A hacker can make your web business suffer through activities like simply taking your site down, vandalising your site, or more insidiously by injecting malicious code that in turn may affect your website visitors. These days, Google will ban pages that contain malicious code that it detects when crawling your website.
Avoid Using Third Party Email Services I see so many businesses that use third party email services as their point of contact, even when they have their own domain name! If you have a website, why not set up some branded email addresses to use as part of the operation of your business? By using a third party email service(such as Yahoo, MSN, Gmail or your Internet Service Provider), you are advertising someone else’s brand. Your web host provider should be able to setup email addresses that use your own website’s domain (e.g. sales@yourwebsite.com). Using a hotmail or Yahoo address does not inspire confidence with your customers either. How much spam have you received from hotmail, yahoo and other free email services? They are used because they are free and can therefore be ‘thrown away’ later on. Having your own domain email address is the more professional approach to business communications.
AWD Understands Online Business Providing secure
eCommerce website design and hosting since 1996, AWD has vast experience with servicing online businesses and helping them grow and prosper. Contact AWD today and speak with a business analyst.
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