Whether you’ve recently founded your company and created a platform to build your online store or you’ve been in the e-commerce niche for a long time, there are always details that will increase the trust of your customers and that you can add to your work.
What other details and steps can you, as a seller, take to keep your online store safe and your sales to continue to grow?
In this text, we’ll list everything you need to do to undoubtedly be recognized as secure e-commerce and develop trust and a good relationship with your clients and customers. The following details and information not only directly affect the trust of your customers and users, but they also affect the development of your online business.
Table of Contents
The Information Section At The Bottom Of The Page (Footer) Is Important For Every Online Store
It’s clear that the priority for e-commerce companies is to display products and product categories, as well as to enable efficient search of offers and services.
However, when you look at some of the examples of e-commerce websites in the world, you can see that there’s always a handful of additional information and pages. You’ll also notice that the very bottom of the footer page is dedicated to official information and details about purchases and products.
With this information, the user will be able to get acquainted with your business, but also to gain trust in you and get a guarantee in the security of your online store. The customer will be able to easily identify which legal entity is responsible, i.e. which legal entity is behind the website, and to be confident in making the purchase.
The bottom of the website page is a great section for linking all these additional pages, but also for visual clarity and good user experience.
You can divide this section into smaller sections in which you’ll indicate all the official information related to the purchase, such as:
- Terms of use and sale
- Complaints and complaint sheet
- Refund
- The right to withdraw
- Delivery conditions
- Methods of payment
- Privacy policy
- Replacement of goods
- Payment by card
- Frequently asked questions
Indicate the following information in this section:
- Official information about your company (e.g. page About us)
- Contact
- Customer service details
- Payment cards you support
- Social networks and newsletter subscription
- Additional details (e.g. searching for the locations of your retail outlets)
Official Information About the Company And Business
It’s extremely important for your business that there are special pages with all the official, unambiguous information about your company:
- Full company name, address, and contact. In addition to this information, we recommend that you provide options such as a contact form and a map of your locations.
- Facts related to the company, such as the year of establishment, the number of physical points of sale (if any), the number of employees, or some other important information. Try to list all this in short lines and numbers if possible, because they visually have a better effect on the visitor.
- The mission and vision of your company, a description through which your customer will be able to get to know you better and learn more.
- What makes your company unique, whether it’s a significant partnership, sponsorship, team, cooperation, and/or uniqueness of your products and services.
Depending on your business, of course, you can provide other information but always prioritize the above. We recommend that you enter them on pages that are as concise and visually categorized as possible. All these details, but also the way you place them, affect the development of trust of your customers and potential new associates.
If you’re a new company, we advise you to dedicate time to planning and designing these sections. The better you organize this kind of content, the better basis you’ll create for the development of trust and future marketing actions, and thus for the development of sales and new partnerships.
Official Acts Related To The Purchase
Official acts, such as the privacy policy and terms of use so that your customer can guarantee that your service is professional, are necessary as separate and clearly positioned pages on the website.
Also, provide information on potential complaints, the right to cancel and refund, as this will make your customers and your customer service more relieved when ordering. In addition, the customer will be informed of the rules and will have confidence that you’re available, fast, and will be able to contact you if there’s a need for it.
Shopping Assistance, Payment Methods, And Card Organization
It’s of great importance for the trust of your customers and good user experience during the shopping process that you provide them with all the necessary possibilities to help with the purchase and transparently list all the payment and delivery methods that you enable.
Dedicate the pages and instructions for user registration, instructions for payment via the website and choosing the method of payment, which will facilitate the process for customers who haven’t had the opportunity to make purchases online.
We recommend that you definitely allow payment by cards and have a separate page on the website with instructions, details, descriptions of card details, and, if possible, visual displays of details. In that case, the bottom of the page should contain the types of cards that can be used to make a purchase on your website.
The fact that you’re affiliated with official, reliable card organizations also guarantees your customers the security in the shopping process on your website.
Many merchants wonder why the bank sign stands, but on the other hand, they should keep in mind that if customers see a bank sign they will feel far safer and know that the given website is verified.
Quality, Specific Product Information
Informative, optimized, and well-designed product pages are key to an e-commerce business. These are the specific pages that your customers will go to from the landing page and make a decision whether they will definitely make a purchase in your online store or not.
In addition to making sure that the call-to-action is visible and clear, the seller should provide as much concrete, unambiguous, and quality product information as possible, such as:
- Exact product name
- Product key
- Newer product images (preferably from multiple angles, and you can use video)
- Exact price of the product with clearly and transparently stated VAT
- If the product is on sale – the exact price before and after the discount, and the percentage of the discount
- Specification or description of features
- Quantities in stock
- Order and delivery details
- Comments and rating section (if you wish to have them)
Apart from this information, you can enter an additional description of the product, which is more freely and creatively written, easy to read, and which may contain a link to another page. It’s desirable that there’s a field for help with purchasing and contact on the product pages.
Help Section Through Which The Customer Will Be Able To Contact You
A great contribution to the safety of shopping and increasing customer confidence is made by the visible section for help with shopping. This should include the ways in which the customer can contact you: e-mail, contact phone, and today the chatbot option is increasingly used because it further speeds up the purchase process.
With the help section, you can also direct the customer to frequently asked questions (FAQ) or additional instructions related to the selection and purchase of products.
Information During And After The Purchase – Confirmation Of The Purchase
Automating the process of sending information during and after a purchase completely speeds up and facilitates the purchase, but it’s also an essential feature of any secure online store.
If customers receive information during the purchase and an e-mail confirmation after the payment has been made, they are fully informed of all steps, trust your business and get a guarantee that the selected product will reach them.
In the confirmation email, it’s necessary to provide all the information related to the purchase, the product purchased, the date and method of delivery and payment, as well as details of your company and contacts.
HTTPS Protocol And Website Security
Since the introduction of the HTTPS protocol, which includes a variant of the former HTTP protocol with additional security, it’s considered unavoidable in a good setup of e-commerce. Although this involves some additional investment, we advise every retailer to use the HTTPS protocol precisely because of the trust of customers and the increase in the number of loyal customers. i.e. returning visitors.
If every customer or visitor of the Internet store immediately sees the notification that the website is technically secure and that their data is protected, they will want to stay on it.
This is also an additional incentive for a new visitor to become your customer, to return, and reuse your services. If you already have e-commerce, the application of the HTTPS protocol will also mean conversion rate optimization.
Additional Tips For A Good Setup Of Your E-Commerce
After taking the above-mentioned steps to make your online store in every way recognized as a completely secure Internet point of sale, we advise you to periodically look at additional user experience improvements.
The loading speed of your website is also a motivation for e-commerce visitors to make a purchase, but also a signal for the safe operation of the website. The loading speed, which increases the bounce rate and decreases your SEO score and Google rank if it’s slow, is pretty much dependent on web hosting.
For instance, MySQL servers can help you not to get into trouble of losing visitors and wind up on some distant page in Google search results. MySQL servers and database hosting plans can support the high volume of viewership traffic to your website, so you won’t have problems with the loading of your website. Yes, at first you can start using a shared server host but if your e-commerce website data is too big for this type of host, check out more powerful options such as MySQL.
Always be aware that your web hosting service is responsible for responding to the requests for your website data coming in from a visitor’s computer or mobile device, so it has to be top-notch to withstand the heavy traffic.
Likewise, Google and other search engines favor websites that occasionally “refresh“ content and optimize the user experience, which also affects the frequency of visits to the website and, ultimately, sales. You can always use free tools to improve the user experience of your webshop, which will give you more information about what you can improve on the website.
You can check and improve the search engine optimization of your online store with the help of other free tools that are today used every day. With these tools, you can also get new ideas on how to plan new content for your website.
All this information will help you get a better idea of your online store, find potential weak points and ways to further improve it, which, along with security, will give an excellent result in the development of your e-business.
