The Importance Of Establishing Client Trust As An Online Business Owner - 1

By Author: Amy Armitage
Total Articles: 2
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Some online business owners spend so much time trying to earn the trust of the major search engines they forget about their actual and potential customers. Don't be one of these search-engine-obsessed business owners. Every visitor to your site is choosing to spend time at your site, among myriad other choices, so if you want to convert that visit to a sale you have some convincing to do. You have to prove, quickly, that you can meet their particular needs. More importantly, perhaps, you have to convey, in words and actions, that you are reliable enough to hold up your end of the bargain.

Long-established firms have been able to build and maintain that kind of customer confidence with their brand strength. If yours is a smaller firm without that kind of recognition, or you have only regional or local reach, you will have to work a lot harder to earn that confidence and establish that trust. This is even more important if you compete with those big, long-established brands.

Common worries remain

Despite the increase security on the Internet as compared to its early days, people still fret about fraudulent ...
... firms, stolen credit card stories and other web-related scares. You have to establish yourself to potential buyers, again quite swiftly, that you are indeed legitimate and will be around tomorrow to take care of a problem with today's purchase. Customers want to be certain that you will stand behind your guarantees, live up to your return policy and, in general, value their patronage and protect their transactions (and personal data). Whatever you can do to lessen their worry is a plus.

Local or regional businesses can build trust by paying attention to appearances as well as reality. For example, your website is your online store and thus the defacto public face of your company. Fair or not, people will draw conclusions about your company based on the appearance of your website, so you need to be modern, efficient and generally look the part of a well-run company. The old saying, Dress for success, applies to your online business, too. Your site must be professional, not look like a first tutorial project on website building. Stay up to date with the latest look, without doing weekly revisions for no reason, of course. Every year or so, however, you should refresh your site's look, features and even color scheme. Make sure your copyright notice, wherever you put it, has the current year in it, too!

Introduce yourself

Everything about your site should reassure customers that you are for real, legit and experienced. These indirect messages are important, but so are direct ones, so don't skimp on the information on your About the company and/or Contact pages. Introduce yourself and your staff with short, informative biographies, mentioning education, degrees, special certifications and other pertinent experience. Having pictures will also personalize the experience for visitors, reminding them that there are real flesh-and-blood people behind this virtual storefront.

Don't forget to do a short biography on the business itself, too - how you started the company, how long you've been around, interesting anecdotes and other things to humanize the site. If you belong to trade organizations, are in the Chamber of Commerce, support local charities and have a clean bill of health from the Better Business Bureau, say so, by all means. Do it without boasting, of course, but don't assume people will investigate your background or company. Tell them about yourself and the firm, proactively.

Amy Armitage is the head of Business Development for Lunarpages. Lunarpages provides quality web hosting http://www.lunarpages.com/ from their US-based hosting facility. They offer a wide-range of services from dedicated server hosting and managed solutions to shared and reseller hosting plans.