Do customers trust my online store?
Why aren’t more people buying online?
Why do I have so many abandoned carts?
What is stopping customers from using my cart?

I hear these cries of concern from business owners quite often, and with good reason. You have to ask yourself one fundamental question about your website, and thus your cart, before you can expect sales to roll in. Do customers trust your online store?

Trust, online anyway, is a funny thing. It takes years of building credibility to gain with your customer base and only one minor thing to shatter that trust. Trust-related issues tend to fit into a few categories.

Credit Card Safety – Is your credit card entered into a secure site? Does it have the little lock in the corner of your browser? What level of encryption? Will it be saving my card details for future orders? Will anyone be able to see the whole number or is it processed by an online processor like Authorize.net?

Hacker Safety – What are the chances that a hacker could be watching? Is the website already compromised?

Privacy – Will they sell or give away my information? Can this vendor be trusted to keep my information safe and secure? What if there is an internal breach? What business partners do they have that can access my information? Will they spam me?

Worm/Virus Safety – Could my computer be in danger by being on this site? Could there by a work or virus somewhere in the cart, or in emails I’ll receive from this site? Are there potential malware issues?

Knowing all of these questions, you can understand why online trust is such a huge concern. There are a few things you can do to install trust.

1. Make sure you have a reputable cart vendor. We use Volusion, and I can’t recommend them enough. Great software, and their security team takes their design very seriously. Because it’s a shared platform and it’s monitored constantly, chances of malware issues or hacker issues are minimized.
2. Make sure you use a well known processor with a SSL (Secure Socket Layer) Certificate. We use Verisign (SSL) and Authorize.net (CC Processor) and they’ve been exceptional.
3. Put symbols for the companies you use on your website. These build trust by association.
4. Test your cart often. Does the lock come up? Is the process of ordering simple, lacking convolusion and obvious? If not, you need to make some changes. If so, you’re on the right track.

Take these steps and you will be back on the road to building online trust. Just be sure to keep up on it. One bad experience online can sour an entire industry on your website.