Introduction
‘A loyal customer is the best business acquisition.’ This has been the truth of the retail sector since its inception. Newer e-commerce businesses find it difficult to build this trust, as the virtual mode of business makes it difficult. That is why we have come up with this guide on how to build customer trust for newer e-commerce businesses.
Customer trust has always been tricky for newer e-commerce businesses as your business is confined to the dimensions of the customer’s screen. Although you might think the space is very limited, it has limitless potential. You have to harness this potential to foster trust from their first click on your store.
In this blog, we will dive deep into some crucial methods on how you can harness this potential. This will allow you to cross the trust barrier with the customer and incentivize purchases easily.
What Factors Influence Customer Trust for New E-commerce Stores?
An understanding of the impact of some key factors will enable you to tailor your customer experience to gain their trust from their first click. You can use this understanding to take some curated steps to make your brand stand out to your customers.
Your brand image factor will be one of the most crucial factors in building this trust. This brand image has to be developed by creating a community around your product and services. Brand image is developed through word-of-mouth and reviews of your store on social media and rating websites.
The user reviews of your store are essentially the representation of your brand in the real world. Even if you have bad reviews, try to respond to them and resolve their issues on a public store. This will enhance the brand image of your store to a great extent.
Apart from your presence in the market, you must implement different security measures on the website. Secure payment gateways and account creation allow the customer to trust your store. Another important aspect here is the product listing. The product description provided should be accurate, consisting of all necessary details. Include real pictures from all angles to give the customer a better idea of your product.
Top 10 Ways to Build Customer Trust on New eCommerce Stores
Now that we have understood the influencing factors for building customer trust, let’s understand how to do it for newer stores. The below list has been curated to enable businesses from any category to build customer trust and community around their store.
1) Trust Signals
Newer stores in the e-commerce sector break their back trying to break the trust barriers. If your brand or store is not a household name, you should be using trust signals on your product and checkout pages. They are displayed to ensure the customer that they are making a purchase with a known and secure entity.
Use a security seal in your packaging to display the tamper-free nature of the package. Services like free returns will allow you to incentivize them to make a purchase despite their trust in the store. Customer reviews and testimonials can be used to showcase the real-world performance of your products.
2) Use Visually Appealing Product Display
Since all the interaction for eCommerce stores happens over a digital medium, there is immense liberty when it comes to displaying your products. Add visually appealing elements to the product page. Use graphic and multimedia elements to display your product on the website.
Adding clear, real photos of your products will allow you to establish credibility with your customers. Along with this, the visually appealing elements will allow customers to connect with the product and its utilities. For example, LensKart allows you to virtually try on the glasses and frames to give you a better idea of their look.
3) Curate Content to Enable Consumers
Content marketing has gained quite a lot of popularity in recent years. Curating content around the topics related to your products and services will allow you to establish your brand as an authoritarian figure with your consumer base. This content can also be focused on educating your target demographic about the problem your product solves, enabling better reach.
Additionally, the content you publish should enable your new and existing customers. If your product has complexities, you might want to provide the user guides. Visual and audio content regarding the use cases and setup guides will improve the quality of customer experience. This hassle-free use process will allow you to have a better relationship and trust with the customer.
4) Usability Features
Your website’s ease of use will contribute to your brand image through word-of-mouth. Therefore, it becomes imperative to enable usability features on the store. These features can be enabled when you design the UX for your store.
For a better understanding of where you can improve the usability, build a customer journey with different buyer personas. You can then study and analyze these journeys to understand the barriers in the purchase journey.
5) Introduce Accessibility Features
Specially-abled people make up the largest minority across the globe. Therefore, the potential market is huge. The accessibility features in the device create an impression of a well-rounded brand. For example, a text-to-speech feature will allow visually impaired customers to have an enhanced shopping experience.
You must include accessibility features like speech recognition and voice control in every part of the customer journey. Follow the guidelines published by the authorities on establishing usability, and test your features with actual people.
6) Implement and Advertise Security Features
As the world continues to grow into a virtual ecosystem, data privacy and security have become a grave concern. Even if you have the best product in the market, consumers may hesitate to proceed with the purchase if there are potential security risks.
That is why it becomes important to implement secure payment gateways with SSL encryption. Once you implement these features, it is important to display these features and security compliances at important places. This will include the display of encryption used on the payment page and secure packaging features on the product checkout and home page.
7) Have a Responsive Customer Support
The supply chain of a newer company is bound to run into some snags. While these are unavoidable, they tend to have a negative impact on the brand image. To avoid this hit on your reputation, the best step is to have a responsive customer support system.
Use advanced features like ChatBots and Live Chat support to make it easier for customers to reach you. Train and equip the customer support team judiciously. This will improve your resolution rate and enable customers to create a trusting relationship with your store.
8) Implement a Reliable Delivery Process
The delivery time is a crucial time period for an ecommerce business. Any issues during this time frame can lead to an increase in the order cancellation rate and product return rate. Therefore, the reliability of the delivery experience becomes crucial for building customer trust.
Choose renowned carriers, and integrate their APIs so that you avoid any shipping exceptions. If your products are fragile or heavy in nature, you should draft a separate SLA tailored to your delivery needs. You can also partner up with a 3PL service to establish a more reliable fulfillment operation.
9) Display Customer Testimonials
In the online world, your user rating is your bonafide. If you are finding it difficult to encourage more conversions, you might want to add customer testimonials on your website. Display them on the home page, and curate these designs to highlight the USPs of your product.
If you operate in a marketplace mode, you can add a separate review section on the product page. Incentivize customers to purchase their reviews with photos and videos of the products and respond to the reviews and complaints regularly.
10) Create and Share Non-promotional Content
Your store will be recognized as a brand only when people think you have enough expertise and authority on the matter. This is why it has become more and more imperative to add and maintain a blog section to your website. This blog section can contain articles about the various topics around your product and services.
These articles will allow you to increase your domain authority for your website. Along with this, your brand name will pop up every time a potential customer researches a related topic. This will allow you to create a brand image in the sector and establish your company as an expert in the matter.
Conclusion
We all have asked for Bisleri when asking for mineral water and Maggi when we wanted instant noodles. We are so used to associating the brand with the product that we consider them the gold standard. Every e-commerce business wants to attain that level of trust with the customer. Hopefully, the above blog has enabled you to take apt steps to start increasing the customer trust levels for your new e-commerce business.
FAQs
1) What are the best tools to build customer trust for new B2C brands?
Outside your website, social media stores have become the best tools to build customer trust for new B2C brands. These social media stores can be used to open a dialogue with the customer. They can communicate their complaints and reviews and enable you to deliver a better shopping experience.
2) What are the four pillars of building customer trust for online stores?
The four C’s of building customer trust are Consistency, Compassion, Communication, and Competency. These four pillars are imperative for newer brands to establish customer trust in their brands. They enable brands to remove purchase blockers and increase the conversion rate across the store.