Trust Seals & Their Impact on Sales: Things You Should Know

With visually appealing trust seals on your website, you can expect to get more leads and improve sales.

Have you ever noticed a logo on an e-commerce site that is screaming to tell that their payment system will not compromise your credit card information? Well, this is an example of a variety of trust-building tools called trust seals. The trust seals appear in a site in various forms such as a logo, icon or badge. They may be placed in the header, near a form, and in the footer or navigation menu.

Some common examples of trust seals are Luxsci’s HIPAA certification seal, Better Business Bureau (BBB), McAfee, TrustedShops, SiteLock, GeoTrust, Thawte, Comodo, PayPal, Visa, Google, Verisign, TRUSTe seals and Shopify.

A graduation certificate from MIT or Oxford will most probably land you up on a high-paying job. Right? (But then after, your performance will decide how long the employer will retain you.) This is similar to what trust seals do to your business.

The trust seals create a sense of trustworthiness in your customers regarding how your business handles their critically sensitive information. Because trust is essential to run a business, especially in the internet era, getting a trust seal can work wonders to drive sales. As per a study, when consumers are looking to adopt the online payment system, key determinants of the adoption are customer trust and enjoyment.  Similarly, it is well known that people makes purchases from people (sites) they know, ones they like, and ones they trust.

What are Trust Seals and What Message Do They Convey about Your Business

A trust seal is an image that appears on the business webpage. It is a visually appealing way of informing customers that the page is legitimate and the business owner takes your privacy seriously. Moreover, the trust seals could work as a sign of special status that your business has achieved over the years of hard work and customer satisfaction.

A number of trusted third parties confer trust seals which you can get by demonstrating evidence of the security measures on your site and paying certain fees to the third parties.

Trust seals convey a positive message about your business to the prospective customers including:

• Dedication to good security practices.
• Secure monetary transaction.
• Verified business identity.
• Credibility and reassurance.

Types of Trust Seals

Depending on the type of business, the target customers, and specific business activity, trust seals can be broadly categorized into the following types.

• Credit card trust seals. These trust seals are intended to create customer trustworthiness in the matters related to financial transactions. Businesses use different logos such as Visa, Mastercard, and American Express to attract customers by showing that they use reliable and popular gateways for payment. Note that PCI compliance is an indispensable part of using legitimate credit card trust seals.
• Security trust seals. Products like Luxsci’s HIPAA-compliant email and website forms, SiteLock, GeoTrust and Thawte protect the safety of sensitive information that the customer inputs during a transaction. Moreover, they also seek to add protections from malware, viruses, and other forms of attack. Security trust seals also can be associated with the use of SSL/TLS certificates. Security trust seals indicate some of the measures that the site owner has taken to protect the sensitive information and secure transactions.
• Business or website trust seals. These trust badges tell the customers that the website they are browsing or the business that’s selling some products has been deemed safe. Website trust seals are not from antivirus services. Rather they are from services that externally scan your site for vulnerabilities or potential infiltration by a virus and confer a certificate only after they find it free from any malware and apparently safe. Some popular trust seals in this category are BBB, McAfee and TrustedShops. Remember the money-back guarantee logo common on many sites?
• Brand associative trust seals. Having an association with well-recognized brands adds value to your business. For example, customers will get a sense of security when buying a product from a new e-commerce site that has the logo of Shopify at the bottom. Some famous brand associative trust seals seen in common practice are PayPal, Visa, Google, and Shopify.

Finding the Right Place for Trust Seals in Your Site

Trust seals are a great way to gain the trust of your customers. But having them in the right place in your website or landing page can be equally important. As a matter of fact, there is no hard-and-fast or a one-size-fits-all rule about where to place a trust seal. However, taking care of a few things can greatly improve user experience.

According to an independent survey, a trust seal near the most critical fields in the ordering process is likely to result in more conversions compared to anywhere else. While generalization of this survey may not be the best thing to do at this moment, you should definitely think of testing the placement and see how one position results in more conversions than another for your specific site.

If you are using a credit card trust seal, the best position for it would be somewhere near the user’s credit card information.

How Trust Seals Boost Sales?

The ultimate aim of placing trust seals on your website is to boost sales. It is commonly seen that customers abandon carts during checkout because when they don’t trust the site.

According to an updated Baymard Trust Seal study, 18% of the respondents abandon during checkout because of the trust issues. Interestingly, gut feeling is the major driver of perception of security in most customers. Another major finding of the study is that visually elegant logos tend to attract more customers.

An Econsultancy/Toluna survey found that customers put trustmarks above any other factors like friend’s recommendation or even well-known brands.

In a split test conducted by Blue Fountain Media, a test page with the Verisign seal boosted sales by 42%. VirtualsheetMusic.com witnessed a 31% jump in conversions after they displayed the Verisign trust seal.

To summarize, trust seals play a key role in boosting consumer confidence in a brand, increasing engagement, and persuading customers to take action and make purchases.

If You are Dealing with ePHI, a HIPAA-compliance Seal is Critical

The HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) law provides standards for data privacy and security in order to safeguard medical information. It covers a wide range of entities involved in storage, transmission, and sharing of sensitive health information. That said, HIPAA also applies to the business associates.

Thus, it is critically important that your business or its partners comply with the law to avoid penalties and potential loss of business. One easy way to inform your customers that your business takes the security and privacy of their information seriously is to display LuxSci’s HIPAA-compliance seal.   There are several version of it that you can choose from, including this one:

LuxSci’s compliance seal is available to all LuxSci customers that have signed HIPAA Business Associate Agreements with LuxSci.

Have a question? “Ask Erik“.