The Shopping Cart Junkie

Getting visitors to your website is one thing, getting them to purchase something is altogether different.

The most important thing you can do to is to develop a trust relationship with your visitors.

Before I, as a prospective customer, will fork over my credit card number to you, I need to have a reasonable belief that you are a legitimate and trustworthy business.

Let me ask you a trick question:

What is the best way to get people to trust you?

The answer, of course, is to be trustworthy.

This actually eludes many people, but it’s really a no brainer. If I want people to believe that I’m an honest and ethical businessman…it would be a great start to actually be the honest and ethical person which I’m trying to portray.

Most people are really pretty bright, and won’t be fooled for long about who and what they are really dealing with. You might make a few big scores through dishonesty, but it’s not the way to build a lasting business.

Now, of course, if you are a legitimate and trustworthy business, you need to show it. There are a few ways to do this online.

A really simple way to do this is to put your street address and telephone number on the site. Crooks very seldom give you their address or phone number, but legitimate business people do, and folks know this.

Another thing you can do is to let the visitor get to know you. It’s not all about the product. Unless you are amazon.com or walmart.com, you’re visitor won’t have a clue who you are. Tell them. Use your About Us page, or your home page to let them get to know you a bit.

Another way to inspire trust is to write some articles about your area of expertise. This let’s you establish yourself as an expert in your field. People trust experts.

Yet another way to inspire confidence is through testimonials or product reviews.

123 eCart has both an article manager module and a product reviews module to help you implement these methods and gain the trust of your visitors. Trust means sales, and sales means money.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 5:19 pm and is filed under Ecommerce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.