Survey Finds 81% of Consumers Don’t Trust Small Online Businesses

“Alessandro Hatami, managing director of PayPoint.net, says: “Small online businesses lack the resources of their larger competitors but have an even greater interest in ensuring their customers have the safest possible experience on their site.

“This situation has led to a haphazard approach to managing fraud – which is in stark contrast to what larger businesses are able to do.”

In addition, PayPoint found that among 1000 consumers, just 3 percent of online shoppers are likely to trust a small online business with their money, preferring to shop with larger online brands. A further 81 percent say they have doubt about the security credentials of small, unknown companies.”

I am sure most of this sounds familiar in these days of technology and the internet. If you own a business whether online or offline, we are sure you have asked yourself this question before, “Do my customers trust my business?” And if you haven’t asked yourself this question, then now is the time.

Two National Consumer Reports Surveys show that…

The #1 concern visitors have: Is my personal information Safe and Secure? (88% of Internet users surveyed, viewed this as “Very Important”)

The #2 concern visitors have: Can I Trust the site and the information on it? (81% of Internet users surveyed, viewed this as “Very Important”)

The #3 concern visitors have: Does the site have a good Privacy Policy? (76% of Internet users surveyed, viewed this as “Very Important”)

95% of those surveyed want access to a websites email address, street address, and phone number.

You can find these surveys at Consumerwebwatch.org

The Trust Guard Mission:

Here at Trust Guard it is our mission to not only help you answer this question but to take action on the question itself. It is not enough to simply think or worry about your websites security, it is time to do something about it.

If 81% of consumers do not trust online businesses then it is time we as business owners do something about it. It is time to give the consumer what they want, which is Trust and Confidence when ordering online.

Consumers around the world are tightening up these days with the global economic downturn. They also are smarter than ever when it comes to shopping online. Consumers are also becoming more aware and more familiar with third party trust seals and companies such as Truste, Control Scan, BBBOnline, McAfee Secure (formerly HackerSafe), and of course Trust Guard. With this being the case you need to ask yourself, “Do I provide a third party trust seal to show my visitors they can trust me?” If the answer is YES, then you are on the right track. If the answer is NO, then you need to reevaluate your business strategies.

Where’s the Value…

The next question you want to ask yourself is, “Where is the best value of security and third party verification seals?”

At Trust Guard we know from 100′s of tests that More Trust = More Conversions. With this in mind, you want to establish the highest level of trust that you can, by addressing the 3 major concerns your visitors have:

• SECURITY – Is your customers information safe?
  Do you use security technology like SSL to protect their financial and private information?
  Do you have PCI Scanning to protect your website from hackers and vulnerabilities?
• PRIVACY - Do you protect your customers privacy?
  Do you respect their information and will you keep it confidential?
  Is your Privacy Policy accurate and up to date?
• IDENTITY – Who is behind your website?
  Is your company address, phone number, and email displayed on your site?
  Has this information been verified by a 3rd party?

All of this can be accomplished by applying the Trust Guard Multi-Seal package that includes PCI Scanning which is our best value. You can find out more about all the packages at

>> http://www.trust-guard.com/trust-guard-seals-s/1.htm

Here is an example of what you get with this package:

These Trust Guard clients increased their conversion using our Multi-Seal packages:

• SummitCampingGear.com – 33.33% increase
• FaithfulTrends.com – 19.51% increase
• SmartLifeLabs.com – 11.11% increase
• ChargedAudio.com – 13.24% increase
• CookForYourHealth.com – 48.28% increase (Anyone want to add almost 50% to their bottom line? Anyone?)
• SuperSizedCycles.com – 216.67% increase (Yes, this is real and it’s backed with a 95% confidence interval – this customer sells higher priced custom bicycles, and adding our seals made a huge impact to her sales!)

Want more results??? Our first batch of daily and quarterly PCI Security seals are just about to finish their split tests. (We just launched PCI Scanning in January. For more information or to watch our PCI launch video read our previous blog posts.) The preliminary numbers for PCI seals are looking great! So far, the combined increase for all of our clients split testing PCI seals is over 26%! As soon as we have more solid data we’ll add it here to the blog, so be sure to keep an eye out.

Till then, we will keep testing. And if you are on the fence, wondering what to do, why not take our 60 day, risk free Trust Guard Challenge. Go ahead and try our seals completely risk free for 60 days. You have nothing to lose and sales to gain!

We look forward to helping you with your security, privacy, and business verification needs.

Sincerely,

Scott Brandley, CEO
Trust Guard

When your running a split test, the larger the sample size, the more accurate the results. It also happens that more traffic gives you the ability to test more variables, as was the case with our latest split test at aplaceformom.com. Aplaceformom.com is one of the largest online lead generation websites for retirement homes across the country, getting about 8,300 visitors a day, or 250,000 visitors a month. Because of their high traffic volume, we were able to do something unique – we split tested 32 Trust Guard seal combinations all at the same time to find the highest converting seal for their particular needs.

While most of our clients use multiple Trust Guard seals on their site to maximize conversion, which is the ideal configuration, aplaceformom.com is a lead generation site and not a store, so they only qualified for two seals – the Privacy Verified seal and the Business Verified seal. In addition, they only wanted to display one seal, so we created 32 different seal options in our test – 16 Privacy and 16 Business – all with different colors, sizes, and styles – and then we rotated them in a single position on their site, directly underneath their application form.

In addition to the 32 seals, we also rotated a blank option, where no seals showed up. In the first round we narrowed the test down to the top 8 performing seals (9 including the blank option). In the second round, a clear winner began to emerge to the point where it beat all other options, but most importantly, it beat the blank ‘no seal’ option by a whopping 16.51% with a 98% confidence interval. The winner was the small blue Business Verified seal. By adding this seal to the bottom of their application, they now receive several thousand more applications per month than before. Not too shabby.

So, should you go and buy the small blue Business Verified seal for your site? Not necessarily. While this case study shows that a single seal can dramatically increase your sales, having multiple seals is always more effective because you’re able to resolve multiple customer concerns instead of just one. It’s also important to remember that each website is unique and has different demographics, so what works on one site may not work on another, which is why we have different colors, sizes, and styles available for you to choose from.

Looking back, this was a pretty fun test. I want to thank Ben Gilbert at aplaceformom.com for his willingness to participate in our test. It’s always great to work with people like Ben that can see the incredible value in split testing. The key to split testing is to keep doing it. Not every test is a winner, but by continually testing, you find winners, and you permanently improve your conversion every time a winning test is completed. I also want to thank our programmers here at Trust Guard for their ‘mad programming skills’ in putting together a test of this size and scale. For all of our future clients reading this, on behalf of myself and the Trust Guard staff, we look forward to helping you increase your conversion.