E-Commerce Optimization

Trust Badges That Will Most Certainly Increase Your Conversion Rate

Categories E-Commerce, E-Commerce OptimizationLeave a Comment on Trust Badges That Will Most Certainly Increase Your Conversion Rate

Abandoned shopping carts are one of the most frustrating things to witness as an online brand. We’ve all done it; we’ve gone online, browsed around, added certain products to our basket, and then not completed the transaction at the end. We abandoned our shopping carts with goods still inside. It’s similar to going grocery shopping, putting items in your cart, then walking away leaving the products in the basket.

Shopping cart abandonment can occur for a variety of causes. According to Barilliance, online merchants lose, on average, 75% of their revenue to shopping cart abandonment. Statista discovered in 2015 that 15% of lost sales were due to security concerns. According to the Baymard Institute, the proportion of lost sales increased to 19% in 2017 for the same reason. This growth emphasizes how essential online security is to most customers.

Simply gaining the confidence of your consumers would allow you to potentially increase your sales by ten percent or more, as demonstrated by this example. For some of you, it may not appear to be much, but it’s a significant gain.

Surprisingly, it is a simple fix.

So, how do you build trust with your consumers? You may begin by using trust badges. Read on to learn about the top five trust badges that may help you improve your conversion rate.

A trust badge – what is that?

A trust badge is a small graphic that you display on your website to convey trust. They’re typically seen during the checkout process, but more and more stores are putting them on their landing or homepage pages. They’re simple elements that may increase sales and user satisfaction with your website.

These trust badges (but not always) come with security measures to safeguard payment card and personal information. The Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL, is a complex internet safety mechanism that encrypts data sent over the web. In general, trust seals are granted when these secure technology is in place.

You can determine if a website you’re visiting is using an SSL security protocol by looking for the little lock symbol next to the URL, or by comparing that the web address begins with HTTPS rather than HTTP. However, not everyone knows this, which is why displaying the trust seal on your site is so crucial.

Types of “Trust Badges”

There are five different sorts of website badges that you can use on your website. Each one has a specific meaning and purpose. You may pick the trust badges to employ on your site depending on the intended result.

Below, you’ll find explanations for five different kinds of trust icon, as well as examples of each and how to acquire them.

1. Safe Checkout Related Badge

The site badge may be the most essential of the five. These are the badges you earn when you join up with a firm that offers an SSL certificate. SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer, and it’s a little bit technical, but in essence, it secures all internet connections and data flowing between them.

If you put a trust indicator on your site, it implies that the checkout process is secure and safe, that data is encrypted, and that your customers’ identity or credit card information will not be stolen. Introducing this level of confidence in your organization will have a significant impact on your overall conversions.

Using the most trusted and recognized secure checkout badges will quickly boost your consumers’ confidence in you. The SSL badge from Symantec is considered the most well-known and trusted SSL badge there is. VeriSign, Norton, and LifeLock are all under the control of Symantec. All of these names are well-known and reputable certificates.

PayPal is another well-known and trusted security solution. You can get PayPal protection just like Symantec, and you’ll get the recognized security badge for your site in the process.

Shopify is another example of a well-known SSL provider. If you set up an ecommerce store on Shopify, you’ll get integrated SSL certificates right away. Customers who buy from a Shopify shop know that their personal information will be kept safe.

The first three examples are of trust badges that must be purchased, however there are free SSL certificate alternatives such as Flywheel or Cloudflare. Keep in mind, though, that because they are known, one of the reasons safe checkout protection charms perform so effectively is due to brand recognition. Brand awareness plays a significant role in establishing trust.

Place these badges next to your “Add To Cart” buttons and at the end of your checkout process. They must be distinct in order for their purpose to be effective. They may also be shown on the bottom of your landing page or homepage.

2. Accepted Payment Badges

Seeing a company that you know instills more confidence than anything else. That’s precisely what these trust badges are designed for. Having Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal acceptance marks as valid payment options on your website may increase the level of trust in it without requiring a lot of effort.

According to a study by ConversionXL, which included 1,000 respondents, Visa-Mastercard was chosen by 42 percent of participants as the most recognized brand and PayPal was voted as the most trustworthy. In addition, ConversionXL claims that “the hypothesis that familiarity accurately predicts a population’s perception of safety is generally accepted. In most cases, greater knowledge result in a stronger sense of security.

The best thing about these trust badges is that they are both free and simple to obtain. Visa has a Verified By Visa merchant program that allows you to obtain a Visa Vericated badge for your site, which will improve confidence and conversion rates if you join up.

Badges are often seen at the bottom of each webpage on your website. They don’t have to be in the spotlight or venerated in any way.

3. Third-Party Endorsements

Third-party endorsements can help your consumers trust you by demonstrating that you are credible. Before receiving the badge, these programs generally include an application procedure and a site evaluation.

The Better Business Bureau Accredited Business badge is one of the most trusted badges available. According to the Better Business Bureau, 173 million people search BBB.org each year for current business profiles in order to verify their ratings. After you’ve earned this badge, your consumers can click a button to confirm your accreditation.

The Google Trusted Store symbol is also a well-known and trusted badge. Please note that the Google Trusted Store badge will be phased out in favor of the Customer Reviews badge. The Generation Y group (under 30 years old) in the ConversionXL study recognized and trusted the Google trust seals over the Better Business Bureau.

To obtain the Google trust seal, you must first submit an application and fulfill the criteria laid out by Google. After purchasing items from your business, clients will begin receiving surveys. After Google thinks the reviews are adequate, you get a badge.

You may be wondering why you’d bother with these trust badges. Although they take a little extra effort and time, they are well worth it, and they can help you improve conversions on your online store. It’s a simple way for you to display your excellent ratings without having to worry about them looking fake or cheesy.

Consider it this way: if you’re looking at a product on Amazon.com and see that it has excellent ratings, you’re more likely to buy it than if the same thing has no ratings. The same goes for your ecommerce site. Consumers are more inclined to do business with you if they know that others have had a wonderful experience with you.

The trust badges are usually positioned near the bottom of the website and are generally larger than accepted payment badges.

4. Money-Back Guarantee Badges

This badge, sometimes known as the “Homemade Special,” is completely free and continues to foster trust with your online consumers. You may either make these badges yourself or purchase ready-made versions if you don’t have the graphic design skills.

Sales increased by more than 32% over an 11-day period for an internet learning firm, according to a “30 day money back guarantee” experiment conducted by Visual Website Optimizer.

The objective of the trust badge is to help consumers overcome their anxiety and avoid worrying about making a purchase online, which is one of the most common causes of conversion rate issues. This confidence badge does not address website security like the SSL and safe checkout badges do, but it does offer assurance that you have your clients’ backs in its own way. They feel safer and are therefore more inclined to buy from you as a result of it.

This is the type of trust badge that should be proudly displayed, since your consumers may not pay attention to it if it isn’t. These badges are frequently positioned near the Add To Cart button or the Checkout button in the same region as the safe checkout badge.

5. Free Shipping and Returns Badge

The free trust icon, which is a badge that informs your clientele that you provide free delivery and/or returns through your online store, is the third option. The “Free Shipping” or “Free Returns” badge may convey trust and a sense of safety to your consumers, removing some of the inherent risk associated with purchasing online. It draws attention to your store policy and exceptional client service.

This trust badge should be added close to the money back guarantee badges.

It’s natural for customers to be hesitant about providing personal information on the internet. With so many data breaches and identity theft being such a big topic of discussion these days, it’s easy to see why consumers are cautious about their online transactions. This is why establishing their confidence is so important to us. We realize that your time is valuable, and some of these trust badges may take work and money to acquire, but the increased sales and ROI will make it worthwhile.

Why Is Site Speed So Crucial? Conversions, Loyalty, and Google Search Ranking Are Affected by It

Categories Digital Marketing, E-Commerce Optimization, SEOLeave a Comment on Why Is Site Speed So Crucial? Conversions, Loyalty, and Google Search Ranking Are Affected by It

Ecommerce success is highly dependent on the speed of your site. It has a direct impact on conversion rates, repeat business, and search engine rankings – and it will be even more important over time, when Google Search ranking changes take place.

Let’s look at why site speed is so crucial, how it will become an important component of Google Search rankings, and how you may enhance your site’s speed.

What is Site Speed?

When a customer enters a café or a restaurant, slow service from the staff very often results in poor customer service reviews and a negative word of mouth (WOM). Similarly, slow site speed on your website can result in bad rankings on search engines, negative user experiences, and overall lower site traffic.

A visitor’s experience with your website, also known as website speed, is defined by how quickly a browser can load fully functional webpages from your site. Users may click away from websites that take too long to load. Sites that load rapidly, on the other hand, are more likely to receive traffic and convert better.

Why is the speed of your website so crucial?

Lower Bounce Rate

Site speed is a sliding scale that ranges from 0 to 100, with 0 representing the slowest and most problematic sites and 100 representing the fastest and best performing ones. According to Pingdom, sites that load in two seconds have an average bounce rate of 9%, whereas those that take five seconds have a 38 percent bounce rate. Hence, the faster your website is, the larger base of customers you’ll have that will move further onwards throughout the purchasing funnel.

Conversion

As mentioned above, the quicker a website is, the lower its bounce rate will be – meaning the greater its conversion rates. According to Google, a one-second improvement in site speed may improve mobile conversions by up to 27%. And with 70% of customers buying on their phones, poor site performance has the potential to severely damage your revenue. Even if a customer doesn’t bounce during the first interaction of the website, then there’s still a high likelihood for this to happen if the site speed is bad throughout the complete customer journey.

Google Search ranking

Higher ranks on search engines like Google help your company attract more prospective consumers. As of January 2021, Google uses site speed as a ranking criterion for search results. Starting in May 2021, sites that are faster will rank even higher on Google, making them simpler for new consumers to locate.

Loyalty (repeat customers)

“It’s cheaper to persuade current clients to make a repeat purchase than it is to attract new consumers,” right? This is something that many businesses probably believe. Site speed does, however, have a significant impact here. In fact, Skilled discovered that when customers are “dissatisfied” with the site’s performance, there’s a 79% chance that they won’t come back again. So speed can have a very important effect on your customers’ lifetime value (LTV).

Site speed updates to Google Search ranking

Google Search’s goal is to assist people in finding the most relevant and high-quality websites on the internet. It accomplishes this by employing a ranking algorithm, which aims to sort through billions of web pages and connect users with what they’re searching for.

Since May 2021, the Google search ranking started to include new page experience signals. These fresh signals integrate Core Web Vitals with current search indicators to measure how people think a website is; they examine how quickly users believe your site is.

Core Web Vitals are user-centric metrics that serves to help users perceive a page as fast:

  1. Largest Contentful Paint is the metric that measures how quickly a website loads. This statistic indicates whether a website is useful by measuring how long it takes for the majority of the page’s main content to load.
  2. The First Input Delay (FID) test is used to evaluate how interactive a website is. The time between when a user first interacts with a page, such as by clicking hyperlinked text or a button, and when the browser can actually respond to that interaction is recorded and measured in milliseconds.
  3. The Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is used to evaluate the visual stability of a website. This metric ensures that users have the best experience possible by tracking how often users are subjected to an unexpected layout change.

What does all of this imply for your business? As a result of increasing the speed of your website, you will be able to rank higher in Google Search and be discovered by more prospective consumers.

How to improve your site speed

Online stores created on Shopify are already fast by default, with a quick global network and lightweight picture files. However, adding new features to your online business—such as videos, multimedia products, live chats, or consumer reviews, for example—can slow down your site speed and reduce your Google Search ranking.

Follow these measures to increase your website’s speed:

  1. Recognize your present site speed. Check out the online store performance report in your admin to see how fast your site is currently loading.
  2. Make continuous site speed improvements. There are a lot of tools which can help you identify places where you can optimize your site speed. The state of perfection more or less never exists – there are always areas where you can enhance the load time.
  3. Repeat the process! When making any modifications to your online store, keep site speed in the top of your mind. Keep track of your speed score and implement changes as needed to always be optimized for conversion, loyalty, and Google Search rankings.

8 Things To Do When Internationalizing Your E-Commerce Business

Categories E-Commerce, E-Commerce Optimization, Entrepreneurship, InternationalizationLeave a Comment on 8 Things To Do When Internationalizing Your E-Commerce Business

Internationalizing your E-Commerce business can sound like a substantial project, especially when you want to localize your activities in all the new markets that you are about to enter. However, due to the substantial improvements which have taken place from a operational and technological point of view in the past decade, creating a global infrastructure for your E-Commerce business does not have to be as complex as it may sound – and you (and your team) don’t necessarily have to even leave your current physical location to realize the project.

Things to Consider When Internationalizing Your E-Commerce Business

1. Bespoke Website for Each New Market

Similarly to other major successful E-Commerce business (e.g., Amazon, Zalando, Asos, THG) I definitely suggest that you should develop a localised website for each market in which your firm operates. By fulfilling various requirements for each website (which will be outlined in the next sections) the idea is to create localized consumer facing experiences which will make the customers comfortable as their shopping experience resembles the experiences of actually shopping on a local website from a national company. The localised setup will naturally increase confidence and trust, and thereby the appurtenant conversion rate on the website – even though that and your company might not be physically present in the country form which the consumer is from.

2. Local Languages

By launching a new country-specific website in the local language, it will be easier for the national consumers to navigate around on the site. Think about yourself: Assuming you are from an English speaking country, you would most likely not visit and shop on a website in an Italian or Spanish language. It’s the same mentality in most Non-English countries. Even though the English language in many ways is seen as an ‘international standard’, consumers from Non-English speaking countries still very much prefer to shop on websites in their local language. If you already have an English flagship website, then you don’t necessarily have to hire – say – a Spanish person to be able to launch a Spanish store. Your master information from the English page can easily be translated through freelancers whom you can create a close partnership with. In many countries where local marketing channels doesn’t necessarily have to be used to grow an online business, one English speaking E-Commerce Manager will be able to manage several localized stores through a network of external or internal translators.

3. Local Currencies

Adding the local currency does naturally increase the conversion rate as consumers always prefer to shop in their natural currency. It’s a habit. Even though the credit card fees might be the same, it’s almost certain that 10 out of 10 would always pick his / her national currency in a transaction, if it’s available. For this reason, it is always suggested to launch the local currency on every local sub-site which you may launch. If you only have one master store, then it is suggested to have multiple currencies on that store – ideally covering all the markets which the website has a present in.

4. Local Payment Methods

Similarly to the local currencies, local payment methods will also reduce the checkout abandonment, thereby increasing the conversion rate on your website. Alternative Payment Methods (APM’s) – also known as digital wallets – have become of substantial importance in the past years, and in some countries it is in fact close to impossible to build an E-Commerce business which only accepts credit cards and other more basic payment solutions like Paypal. In China, the majority of the transactions do as an example take place through Alipay, WeChat Pay and a few other APM’s – more than 50% of all transactions do in fact take place through APM’s. So regardless of where in the world you’re launching, make sure to implement the right APM’s from the very beginning, as this will enhance your conversion flow. A separate article will be written on APM’s at a later stage.

5. Local TLDs – Country Level Domains

So this one is actually tricky. Whether to launch a localized E-Commerce setup through Top-Level Domains (TLD’s) or subfolders have always been a large discussion point in the E-Commerce community. However, I’ve always been a strong advocate of a localized setup through TLD’s – and here is why. When using a country level domain structure (i.e., when a German website as an example uses the .de domain, a French uses the .fr domain, and a Korean uses the .co.kr domain) the presumption of consumers is usually that they are shopping from a national company. A foundation for the store is here created, where consumers can feel completely comfortable, as the domain structure doesn’t deviate from the local competitors. This is the absolute most important tricker to facilitate conversions; that is, trust. Having just one .com website, which then has several other languages in a dropdown is also a good solution, but will never be the same a launching a local store with a TLD. With people becoming more digital and e-commerce savvy over time, the importance of TLD’s will slowly vanish, but for now I would still very much do it. The main downside is of course, that you’ll have multiple stores that are separated from one another when launching them with local TLD’s, and this means that your SEO strategy in particular have to be executed on a more granular level.

6. Local Logistics Partners

As a function of the rapid adoption of E-Commerce in the past decade, consumers expectations towards your service level have also sky rocketed. In the past years, the delivery times have been reduced exponentially on a year on year basis, now reaching a level where many brands have same-day delivery in certain markets. Having a one week delivery time is simply just not acceptable any longer, which is why it is very important to establish an adequate operational infrastructure from day zero. The good news is that most international courier companies now have established a global infrastructure which allows them to ship goods cross-border from one day to another, meaning that local storage for fast deliveries isn’t a necessity anymore. Large brands such as Zalando, The Hut Group, and others, fulfill a global demand from just a few warehouses globally. In fact, I’ve once worked for a brand which generated +£100 million in a country, without having any local storage our people situated in the country. The point here is that you can create an international e-commerce setup with just a few warehouses globally – even one is enough in the beginning – the only requirement is just that you find a 3PL partner which has good agreements with courier partners that can deliver to all your core markets within a short time period.

7. Local Customer Service

Having a customer service function which is localized for your core markets is very important to consider early on in your internationalization journey, in the markets where the average English language skills of your target customers aren’t very high. Of course, if your brand primarily targets English speaking markets, as well as markets where the target consumers on average have adequate English language skills (e.g., Scandinavia, Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, and the like) then an English speaking customer service agent can be sufficient. However, if you enter various different markets, where the target consumers don’t have adequate English language skills, then customer service agents for each of these markets will become important. If you are a part of a company which have limited capital, then it is recommended to use other functions internally for this work stream on an initial basis, where the “pressure” from the consumers isn’t very high. In case you have a Country Manager or Market Manager structure in your company, then these functions can manage the customer service work stream in the initially, whereafter local agents can be hired internally or externally when the amount of tickets / inquiries exceeds a certain level.

8. Local Campaign Strategy

A local pricing and campaign strategy can be crucial for your success when localizing, especially if you are internationalizing across multiple territories which are very different from a cultural perspective. Establishing prices for your product(s) / service(s) is more an art than a science, and the campaigns which you may be running from time to time will differ substantially if the markets that you operate in vary a lot.