What Influences The Trust Factor Online ?

Author : Bharati Ahuja

Trust is the topmost layer of the semantic web. It is like the cherry on the top of the cake which makes the cake look appealing. People do business with those that they like, know, and trust. If a consumer believes that a specific brand produces quality products or services then such a customer is most likey to become an online brand ambassador.

Trust is the end result of many factors in action. Trust is the emotional and logical aspect of the users decision to refer and recommend the site and content if he has been getting valuable information from the site.

Trust cannot be purchased, it has to be earned over a period of time via continuous and consistent efforts and reliable actions.

Potential online customers critically evaluate a site before finalizing the call to action on the web page.

Some of the factors the online customer may scrutinize and critically evaluate are:

• A good updated and a functional website: A website which is regularly updated with the latest stock and offers is more trusted than the rest. A consistent logo displayed on an overall web presence on across all platforms builds brand value and also helps customers have a better recall value. Being genuine and avoiding any over the top announcements and claims also adds to the trust factor.

• A blog that is regularly updated: A blog is a platform where you can share any news about the industry or about your company. Please do not make your blog a sales platform and avoid spreading sales messages. A blog is a place where you can establish the foundation for your online ‘Thought Leadership’. By offering information and by sharing your knowledge you show that you care and are willing to help your readers / customers / visitors. A person landing on any page of your blog via search engines or social media or via any media should get information about what he was searching for. This encourages repeat visits which lead to recommendations to others. A blog can also become a communication platform via comments.

• Social media activity: Social media is the best platform where your satisfied readers and customers are going to share their experiences. This same platform offers you also the option for sharing the content of your website and blog. Social media is not about likes, followers and the no. of people in your circle but about what people are writing about your business/ blog or products and how it is being further shared. Social Media signals in the long run are the main source which help establish the online reputation of a business.

• Reviews And Ratings: Reviews and Ratings where people have to login to express them have a better trust factor than the ones posted on the site by the website owners on the website. Though there is a lot of spam involved with this and this factor has to be taken with a pinch of salt it adds to the trust factor in a limited way.

• Testimonials: Testimonials from authority people of your industry and from satisfied clients who have a good online reputation does add to the trust factor and influence the user positively.

• Good Search Presence: Search engines are the place where all your potential buyers start from . If you have optimized your blog and website and are found by the searcher for more than 3-4 search queries made by him , it will surely sow the seed of trust in his mind and as he goes further and searches on social media and other platforms and again he finds the same presence it goes on adding up and develops an interest and curiosity to know more about your business and products.

• Secure Payment Gateway: A secure site where the user can share his personal details and credit card details securely without any fear surely again gains more trust.

• Quick response to the inquiry form filled by the user: An online buyer wants quick answers to his queries as he has multiple options available online. If you delay in providing the answers he is surely going to move on to the next option.

• Brand search results: Ranking for relevant search queries surely gets you the targeted traffic but when these potential customers want to know more about your company, they expect you to rank for brand search queries too. If your website does not rank for brand search queries then it has a negative impact on the searcher. Hence, ranking for brand search queries is equally important.

• Contact Page: A detailed contact page which explicitly has the address and contact numbers adds to the trust factor. If you do not share contact nos. and address and only have a form then it may be detrimental to the trust factor. Why should they share their contact information when you cannot share yours? Openness, genuineness and the willingness to offer answers will surely win the trust vote for your online presence. In this case being found on local search results of Google with all the details too helps in winning the trust of the online visitor.

• About us page: Last but not the least, though people are buying the products online they always are curious to know the humans behind the front end and feel confident when the ‘About us’ page has the details of the team offering the facility online. After checking out the products people may also check out the management and other team members online especially when the amounts to be online are substantial.

Just like in real life it takes time before your friends or customers can trust you , online too it takes time to build trust and then retain it. It may range between 2 – 5 years to build the initial trust and then to retain it is a constant exercise and is a continuous effort in proving them that their trust in you is not a wrong decision made by them.

Ecommerce- The Pros Cons And Why I Love These Sites

Guest Post

What’s the first thing you do when you start a new site? Pick a niche. Well my niche is ecommerce, granted it’s a little broader than what you would typically expect but the one thing that I’ve always found strange about affiliate sites is that you build the site and optimise it to attract visitors and once they get to your site your trying to push them off your site and onto the merchants. Now I’m not trying to put the boot into affiliates and I’ve made a lot of money from these sites and they help to pay a lot of peoples wages but for me when I get a visitor to my site I want to keep them there as long as possible and still make money from them. With a web shop I can do that.

A webshop is a different breed of site and to make one work there needs to be a lot going on in the back ground, things that the customer will never see. Stock control, warehousing, dispatch and staffing are all key elements to running a successful web shop.  There is little difference between running a web store and running a shop, you still need to deal with useless suppliers and you will always have the problem of keeping your customers happy, but to me these are just par for the course and I have found the more of these types of sites I set up the smoother I can make the backend process.

The web is a competitive place and it seems that with a lot of the industries I’m currently in it’s just a race to the bottom on price, who can be the lowest and still make money and this isn’t something that’s going away, so we either need to differentiate ourselves from the rest of our competition, or we can lead that race to the bottom and either tighten things on the back end or shift more products. The words “box shift” springs to mind.

Now before I completely put you off ecommerce sites let’s talk about the good things and why I have spent years learning to build these into successful businesses.

Dropship is word that warms my heart it takes away a lot of the hassle with the back end and in the industries were these work best you are more or less working as an affiliate for the drop shipper, margins will be effected so just make sure you pick an industry where price isn’t necessarily the driving factor behind a sale and in time holding the stock your self will allow you to increase margins.

Now this is where there more traditional web marketing comes into play. Many people believe that building links to an ecommerce site is one of the hardest things to do and they may be right, but I see this as a good thing, if you are a better link builder then your competitor then you can beat them. If you can write better copy then your competitors you can drive more sales, in most cases this isn’t hard to do as they just copy the product description from the manufacturer’s sites. Why not get an army of affiliates to work for you, we already know what they look for in a good offer so why not give it to them and let them drive sales for you.

I think the idea of running a webshop has a stigma attached to it but there really isn’t that much to it, if you believe that you have what it takes to drive traffic to the site then you’ve got a good foundation to running a successful ecommerce store and you’ll find that everything else will fall into place after that, there is a lot of trial and error involved in the early stages of any business but this is where we learn from our mistakes and build on our successes. Well I hope there is something here that will help you make the move to ecommerce and all the great things that go with it.


Author Byline:

This is a guest post by Neil Jones, head of marketing for eMobileScan a leading providers of bar code scanner  and barcode printers, including the Zebra GK420D

Ecommerce, Magento And Your Online Store

With the growing increase in online sales taking your store or business online is the most sensible and logical decision. Businesses which do not offer products or services online stand a risk of losing their online market share to their competitors.

Once you decide to take your store online the most logical question is : which is the best platform for developing the ecommerce site with user friendly built in features for a shopping cart, e-payments, CMS and site administration.

There are quite a few options available but we recommend Magento for an online store as Magento is a feature-rich eCommerce platform built on open-source technology that provides online merchants with unprecedented flexibility and control over the look, content and functionality of their eCommerce store.

Magento’s intuitive administration interface features powerful marketing, search engine optimization and catalog-management tools to give merchants the power to create sites that are tailored to their unique business needs. Designed to be completely scalable and backed by Varien's support network, Magento offers companies the ultimate eCommerce solution.

You can read the FAQs related to Magento on http://www.magentocommerce.com/product/faq 
 
Once you have an online business its not the end but the beginning for establishing that business. As the online competition , marketing  and management are also issues which have to be given attention to.

• Advertising the URL is crucial initially till you gain a substantial WOM (Word Of Mouth). Locally you may be a brand and quite famous but when you go online you need to establish that brand as you in real time when you first started your business. 

• Most of the people will find your store via the search engines – Hence, optimizing your site for the search engines is something which cannot be taken lightly. Next is to generate a good online reputation so that it generates a favorable WOM is important . 

• Social media presence helps you to have a voice on the web. You can start engaging with your existing clients via social media which in turn will help you to get additional genuine fans and followers and help you have a wider reach. 

• Encourage existing regular customers to buy online so that they can share their user experience (UX) with their friends and followers via reviews, emails and by posting on their social media profiles. Make all these options available on the site itself so that they can send the message easily online. 

• Create a blog which gives you the platform for sharing your ideas, promos, advice, etc. thereby helping you to establish an online brand image and persona. 

• The online market scene is no different than the real time market but the online markets help you to have a faster and wider reach. 

Think Local And Act Global is the latest mantra of the online world which substantiates that Marketing is active storytelling , PR is reactive storytelling - Internet marketing is real time, active and reactive and has a local And global reach. 

Ecommerce & Mobile Web 2011 – Time To Take Your Store Online If you Want To Future Proof Your Business

The latest buzz on the gizmo gadget scene is that Smartphone usage is set to increase dramatically with the sales volume forecasted to rise from 174 million in 2009 to 500 million in 2014 with a CAGR of 16.28%.

News is also dominated by headlines like : 

• Smartphone sales jumped by 34 per cent in third quarter of 2010: IDC India 
• "Overall, Indian smartphone sales are expected to touch 5.96 million units by end of 2010," says Naveen Mishra, lead analyst, Mobile Handsets Research, IDC India. 
• "The propensity to adopt feature phones and smartphones is greatest amongst the youth and business executive segments, whose purchase decisions are often driven by peer group influence and workplace usage patterns, as well as larger disposable incomes and willingness to experiment with new technology platforms," Anirban Banerjee, associate vice-president, research, IDC India mentions in an official communiqué. 

The phones are being used more like laptops . The desktops were discarded for laptops and now smartphones are being seen replacing the laptops in increasing numbers.

With more and more Apps. Being available for smartphones the ease with which you email, communicate, connect to social media sites, play games or even surf websites on these phones is making people use the phone more than their laptops.

According to John Shen, the Lab Director at Nokia Research Center, the smartphone of 2015 will go even further: You will be able to link phones together to form a cluster where a group of phones provides PC-like processing capability.

In short the web is becoming more and more mobile . This is backed by the statements made by the people in the online industry during this season on online sales:

• Daily online sales exceeded $1 billion on six days this season, which was twice as many days as a year ago, said Michael McNamara, a vice president at SpendingPulse. The growth meant online sales grabbed a larger share of the season’s total sales, he said. 
• “Today eCommerce accounts for a much larger share of overall retail sales compared to a few years ago. And during this holiday season, it registered double digit growth for 6 out of 7 weeks,” Michael McNamara, vice president of MasterCard Advisors SpendingPulse, said in a news release. 

The main point to be noted is that the chidren of today get their first phone by the age of thirteen and are also used to the mode of cashless payments. 

Hence it is very important to note that the teens and twentys of tomorrow will be more accustomed to online buying, if your store is online and has a wide presence on the web then your business has a future else there is a full possibility that you lose the online market share to your competitor who might have gone online and mobile before you.

The web removes the geographic boundaries and offers you the option to target the local and the global markets depending on your online strategies.

As the smart phones become smarter we also have to become smarter to adopt the revolutionary and evolutionary changes and learn how to balance our virtual and real lives at the same time benefitting from the benefits of the online world .