Hello and welcome to the third and final part of our Ultimate Ecommerce Reference Guide: Building Trust and Increasing Sales. In Part 1, we discussed maximizing your store’s usability to provide a smooth and intuitive shopping experience; in Part 2 and 2.5, we went through some of the ways to make your site more accessible to search engines and a few key techniques for generating more traffic.

In this post, we’d like to go over some of the ways in which you can utilize the concepts of the previous posts to generate increased sales and keep people coming back for more.

Allow Users to Create Wish Lists

Wish Lists have become a very popular feature of many notable ecommerce applications for several reasons – both in terms of user-convenience and sales benefits. Used along side other shopping cart abandonment tracking (more on that later!) they can be a great way to generate leads and help you follow up with your customers.

1. They allow users to save items for later reference, removing the pressure to purchase immediately.
2. They increase registered users and the contact information captured from these new sign ups can later be used to inform your new customers (with their permission, of course) of promotions and other news.
3. Wish lists can be shared with others! Bringing more traffic to the site and increasing first-time buyer rates.

Let Users Post Product Reviews

The internet is chock-full of people who’d be happy to give their two cents about their purchase experiences, but since a lot of sites fear negative feedback and don’t allow customer product reviews – encouraging your visitors to do so can be extremely empowering. Including product reviews on your site tells customer that you’re confident in your product, but willing to take criticism and suggestions. This openness will certainly increase trust in both your brand and your products.

And not only are product reviews helpful to potential customers, but they’re also an easy way to add unique content to your product pages (which Google will love you for).

Display Customer Testimonials

The benefits of customer testimonials are similar to those of product reviews:

• They reassure potential customers that you’re a reputable organization – adding highly valuable credibility.
• They empower existing customers by allowing them to share their impressions and can even provide link juice should a link back to their site be included.
• And they provide fresh, user-generated content for your site that all parties can benefit from.

Amish Furniture Home testimonials often include user provided photos of the furniture sold.

Testimonials are a must for increasing ROI as they help to eliminate fears and doubts – making it far less stressful on the customer when considering a purchase.


Submit Your Products to Google Base

Google Base, as defined by Google is, “a place where you can easily submit all types of online and offline content, which we’ll make searchable on Google”.

In many of the modern shopping cart solutions, it’s become common to include an “Export to Google Base” feature that allows you to upload your entire catalog directly to the Google Base database. Once products have been added, they can then be searched for in Google Base and may even appear in standard Google search results based on relevance.


Start a Newsletter (or Two!)


Newsletters are another great way to increase registered users and provide customers with important information regarding promotions, new products, etc.

If you have the resources, consider starting two newsletters – one focused on specific updates relating to your business and another that relates more generally to your industry. If you were a furniture company, for example, one newsletter might focus on promotions and the other might center around interior designing tips.

Constant Contact has become an industry standard in Email Marketing with features like custom HTML templates and view tracking reports. Constant Contact is not free, however – so if you’re working on a limited budget there are many other free and open source solutions available like PHPList.

Shopping Cart Abandonment Tracking

If a customer abandons their shopping cart, it can be helpful to follow up with them to inquire about what prevented them from ordering. While some customers may not respond, you’ll at least have the opportunity to convert them. You can also use their feedback to identify usability concerns or bugs in your checkout process.

Many of the popular ecommerce solutions include some form of shopping cart abandonment tracking, however this could also be pretty easily built into a custom application – you just need to save the customer information before order completion.

Include McAfee SECURE and Trust Verification Badges

These badges are an industry standard way of ensuring site security and increasing visitor trust, as they generally mean that the site has passed rigorous safety tests. McAfee SECURE, in fact, scans sites that host their badge on a daily basis, searching for any vulnerabilities within the site structure. A few other reputable certifications include SSL and BBB Online.

Provide Easy Access to Contact and Policy Information

Finally, one of the easiest ways of increasing customer trust is by making important information – like privacy, shipping and return policies, terms of service, and contact information, easily accessible. Highlighting this information helps to ensure your customers that you’ve covered all the bases and are available for customer support.

Your contact information should include as many ways to reach you as possible, since different people prefer different contact methods. Some might wish to send a quick email, others might prefer a direct dialogue through Twitter, while there are those who still prefer the old-fashioned snail-mail approach. In any case, having these direct forms of communication will increase transparency and consumer trust as they allow for the development of personal and communicative relationships.

The Customer Comes First!

Ultimately, the way to increase sales and build customer trust is to give the customers what they want. Make their lives easier with wish lists; help them to feel at ease with product reviews and testimonials; and build one-on-one relationships whenever possible.

With eCommerce software becoming more and more robust, AND more extensible, it has become much easier for shop owners to create custom features and functionality to cater to their products and customers.

Are there any trust building or sales increasing techniques that your business couldn’t survive without? Share them in the comments!