Acadiana Websites

Conveying Trust with Your Webstore Design

People trust brick and mortar. They can see it. They can touch it. They can drive to it, handle the merchandise before they buy it, and return the merchandise in person if they’re not completely satisfied.
They can talk to real people, and they know that the store isn’t going to vanish tomorrow.

Customer trust in brick-and mortar retailers carries over into the online retail space. Some well-established E-tailers, such as Amazon.com and Buy.com, have earned brick-and-mortar status online. Shoppers willingly pay more for items on these sites, because quality service, security, and peace of mind are worth more to them than just a low price.

What does this mean for you? It means that trust is a priceless marketing commodity. It means that building trust, through your webstore and customer service and affiliations, can pay huge long-term dividends. It means that investing in customer trust is one of the best business decisions you’ll ever make.

In this three-part series, you discover various ways to earn the trust of the Internet community, build a loyal consumer base, and increase sales along the way.

Designing trust into your web storefront

Brick-and-mortar retailers invest a great deal in designing and building attractive storefronts and product displays. They know that to remain competitive, they need to deliver comfort, convenience, and an aesthetically pleasing shopping experience that fosters a sense of trust. If people simply want low prices, they’ll shop at flea markets and garage sales.

To design trust into your web storefront, attend to the following:

• Website layout
• Graphics and other images
• Site navigation
• Product descriptions and other copy (the written word)
• Grammar and spelling

Website layout

Some webstores try too hard to be impressive. Flashing text, pop-ups, animations, and other ‘eye candy’ create an overly flamboyant site that actually destroys trust. A predictable, clean, and professional layout instantly evokes trust.

Most professionally designed sites have three main components:

1. Header
2. Navigation bar
3. Main content area

Note that the header and navigation portions should change very little, if at all, from page to page. Breaking this consistency can result in a visitor thinking they have left your site, which can be a very confusing, i.e., not to be trusted, experience. The header should contains a “utility bar” for navigation to account-related or very commonly accessed information.

It is also common practice to have a footer containing links to important sections of your site, like
an About page, or a Contact Us page complete with your email address, hours of operation, and a telephone number.

Graphics and other images

Professionally designed graphics are a must for trust. If you can’t hire a professional designer, and you don’t have the skills yourself, consider purchasing royalty-free graphics from an image store such as iStockphoto.com or TemplateMonster.com.

Some things you should avoid:

• Flashy, animated gifs. These serve mostly to distract visitors and are a hallmark of an amateur website.
• Graphics with large file sizes that cause your page to load slowly. Use image editing software to compress your graphics files. Gimp is a free yet powerful image editing tool.
• Avoid background images whenever possible, particularly tiled backgrounds. Background images usually just add clutter to a page. The exception is with backgrounds that aren’t noticeable, in which case, why use one at all? Sticking to a plain white background is the usual recommendation here.

High-quality product photos are also essential. Most suppliers offer stock photos that you can use for free (simply right click on the photo, select “Save Picture As…,” and rename the photo according to
your own needs). If you’re taking your own photos, check out these Tutorials “Phototuts” for tutorials on producing high-quality photos.

Site navigation

Have you ever tried to shop in a store in which products are shelved following no logical system of organization? You can get so flustered that you simply flee the store to retain your sanity.

In an online store, chaos and confusion are even tougher to avoid. The following guidelines can help you design a site that’s simple and intuitive to navigate:

• Add a navigation bar for quick access to popular areas.
• Group products into easily-recognizable categories.
• Display popular products or products you want to highlight more prominently.
• Avoid dead-end pages—pages in the main content area of your site that provide no exit. Dead-end pages will leave customers confused and likely to leave your site.
• Provide quick access to the shopping cart, the customer’s account, and order status details.
• Use page titles to indicate the current location on your site. Titles should always have the same look and feel i.e., font type, size, color, location, etc. to create familiarity and trust.
• If you have a deep hierarchy of subcategories, make use of a breadcrumb trail,
  which allows visitors to quickly navigate backwards to a previous location. (A majority of large retailers utilize breadcrumb trails, so consumers expect to see it on trusted sites.)
• Offer a search tool.

Tip:

Ask your most critical friends and family members to test your webstore before going live and provide you with feedback. Hands-on testing in multiple different web browsers—such as Internet Explorer, FireFox, and Safari—is best.

Product descriptions and other copy

Your webstore is at a slight disadvantage compared to standard retail stores—customers can’t pick up the product and look at it, nor can they walk up to a sales clerk and ask questions. Your only way of reaching customers is through copy (text), images (photos and other graphics), and email or phone (to answer questions).

In a webstore, clear, concise, and well-written copy sells products. To compose copy that sells, follow these guidelines:

• Read copy you like and imitate it. Learn from the pros at the big name sites.
• Focus on content. Good copy is informative.
• Read it out loud. Good copy sounds good, too.
• Describe benefits. How does the product make the customer’s life easier or more enjoyable? Remember, you’re not only selling products—you’re selling them to someone. See “Selling Benefits: Pitching to Your Customer’s Needs.”
• Keep it short and punchy. You’re not writing a doctoral dissertation.
• Choose the right words. Use a thesaurus.
• Write as if you were creating a billboard, not an article. Savvy consumers tend to treat web pages like a billboard. They do not want to be bogged down by a lot of copy. Visitors should have a good understanding of what your site is about from reading just the headlines and bullet points.

Grammar and spelling

Grammatical and spelling errors subtly convey several negative messages to your customers:

• You don’t care about your business enough to attend to minor details.
• You don’t care about your customers enough to impress them.
• You’re careless and will probably mess up their orders.
• You probably whipped up the site quickly as part of a scam to capture credit card information.

Few things kill trust faster than copy that looks like it was edited by a 5-year old. Trusted websites don’t have spelling or grammatical errors.

Tip:

According to most writers and editors, you should never edit your own material. Always have at least one other person read your copy before posting it to your site, and then read it again once it’s posted.