8 eCommerce Strategies for Building Trust through Branding

Human relationships are founded on trust nurtured between persons. If either party breaks it, building it again will be difficult. In eCommerce, it makes things more problematic, as trust is an intangible binding a consumer has with a product or a company. Most often, the trust becomes an emotional but non-contractual obligation, subsequent to a better customer experience.

In all contexts, companies hold vested interests in developing trust as a means to meet their promotional goals, and therefore it is finally your strategic pulling-in the customers by infusing in them consumer loyalty. Without developing any trust element between your product and the customers, you will never be able to maintain consumer loyalty, which is the only way for growing eCommerce business.

Here are a few ways to build trust and brand loyalty of your online business.

#1. Get attached with your consumers emotionally

No customers will just buy a product, simply because you placed it on your web page. For this, they need persuasion, which is your trust building strategy. Your eCommerce success revolves around how far you are successful in doing this. Your customers’ buying decision can become positive only if they could cultivate an emotional relationship with the product.

#2. Make your product reliable

Mostly your customers may not have any prior knowledge about you or your product, except what is discretely fed into them by the search engines. Naturally, such visits often leave doubts about your integrity in keeping their money safe. There are also chances of their suppressing a feeling of uncertainty about your fulfilling the orders.

#3. Try to retain your customers

Getting a new customer involves 7 times more money, time, and effort than retaining an existing one. Therefore, customer retention must be given priority, as even a small percentage of increase in retention can lead to a dramatic increase in the product sales.

That said, the average order value for returning customers is thrice that of the first-time customers.

Image Source: SwellRewards

Recent researches have affirmed that 65% of the revenue collected by the eCommerce companies comes straight from the returning customers, and their contribution is 48% of the total U.S. e-commerce.

#4. Improve customer relationship and service

Many customers will leave your company if the support given is below their expectations. Dissatisfaction with the quality of your products and poor after sales service can compel the customers to leave your company in distrust. Such failures in trust building and customer retention can be fatal for all eCommerce business owners.

The latest statistics reveal that the average value of loss due to non-retention of customers at the global level is $243 billion. In the US alone, poor customer service caused a loss of $83 billion, last year.

#5. Reinvent customer experience

Customer experience is a major factor determining customers’ trust with a company. As per the Walker study, it has already indicated that what is going to decide on the price and product of a company in eCommerce by the year 2020 will be customer experience.

Image Source: VisionCentral

#6. Maintains Transparency

The success of eCommerce depends mostly on the customer experience, which is always linked with transparency in transactions. Therefore, while maintaining transparency at all levels of the transaction, you can easily place customer reviews on your sites, as well as the social networks.

#7. Do check customer reviews and improve it

Researches have reinstated that people who happen to read customer reviews are 105% more likely to purchase during page visits. Any failure in promoting positive reviews can become disastrous to your eCommerce dreams, as recent surveys have indicated that consumer reviews are trusted 12 times more before making an online purchase.

Also, 89% of shoppers have stopped buying online, due to bad customer service. The contribution of customer review in developing trust can be understood from the fact that 61% of customers read online reviews prior to their purchase decision.

What is third party reviews and how it helps to your brand?

The retailers can use third-party review platforms for raising the customer service standards to avoid negative feedbacks. Many retailers, such as; Comet, Argos, Tesco and many more employ this strategy to construct reliable reviews on their product pages, so that the customers get a good impression about the products, which are pathways of building trust. The market research studies have validated this, stating that 63% of online customers purchase; only from sites that post user reviews.

#8. Be active on social media

Posting reviews about your product and service on social media, along with your vendor platform, will surely act as a catalyst in generating trust in your visitors. Equally, it will make you committed to quality service, increasing your website’s conversion rate.

Image Source: SmartInsights

Additionally, posting social proof as evidence of the quality and reliability of the product, will inspire the customers to trust not only the product but also the company. Basically, people’s trust in anything is deeply influenced by the recommendations of their kith and kin, rather than the reviews and testimonies from other sources.

Conclusion

To conclude, eCommerce is built upon trust, that is developed through repeated customer visits, customer satisfaction, and brand loyalty. The business owners need to provide more insights about their products and service publicly, so that the new customers can make a purchase decision with confidence. Consumer reviews on social media, testimonials, and social proof have a deep impact in building consumer trust, which is the only way to make eCommerce glorious.

MobiCommerce

MobiCommerce is a leading end-to-end eCommerce software solutions provider. Known for developing scalable and feature-rich Marketplaces, eCommerce websites, mobile apps, and Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), MobiCommerce boasts of being more feature-rich and fast as compared to its competitors. It has a steady clientele from the GCC and Europe.