6 Key Success Factors for Your Online Shop
What are the key issues that online retailers should resolve to prosper? We identified five key areas that will help you to enhance your profits.
If you’ve seen the Trusted Shops logo around, you might have asked yourself “What is Trusted Shops exactly?” or “What can they do for my shop?”. Let's take a look at some of Trusted Shops' core products and give you some insights into how Trusted Shops can benefit your business.
Table of contents:
A quick word about "trust"
When people say they trust someone or something, we often think of it as a feeling, but in actuality, trust is a calculated risk. For example, we use a lot of mechanisms to judge someone's trustworthiness:
- aesthetics: He looks trustworthy.
- reputations: Jim said he's a good guy.
- presentation: Pam sounds like she knows what she's talking about.
- and more...
The same rings true for your online shop. Therefore, you should keep in mind that although trust might not be tangible, there are concrete things you can do to ensure your site is perceived as trustworthy.
The fact that trust is "perceived" means that it's your job as a shop owner to make sure you communicate that trustworthiness. Remember, trust is difficult to earn and easy to lose.
At the end of the day, you know you're trustworthy, but do your potential customers?
Trusted Shops in 96 seconds
As you might have guessed, Trusted Shops has something to do with trustworthy websites and "trust solutions".
You may or may not know what "trust solutions" means and I don't blame you. After all, trust is a pretty abstract concept, right? It's certainly not measurable... or is it?
Check out this video, which explains what Trusted Shops does (in 96 seconds!):
Keep reading for a more detailed look at how Trusted Shops helps businesses build trust!
Trusted Shops' core products
Trusted Shops is a company that acts as a 3rd party representing the common interests of both consumers and retailers. With over 25 years of e-commerce experience, Trusted Shops knows what is truly important to shoppers as well as businesses.
With this knowledge, they've created the Community of Trust:
- +32,000 online shops and 40 million consumer memberships
- +10,000 new consumer memberships per day
- Over one million daily purchases take place between Consumer Members and Business Members.
- Active in 16 countries across Europe.
- Trusted Shops solutions are supported in 12 languages.
With a variety of products and features to help shop owners build trustworthiness, let's take a look at Trusted Shops' core products:
Service Reviews
Service reviews (aka shop reviews, seller ratings) are the lifeblood of every business. The trust solutions from Trusted Shops begins with service reviews.
With authentic service reviews, shops can continuously improve customer retention while simultaneously boosting trust with first-time visitors.
Your reviews can of course be displayed directly on your site with our dynamic widgets, but your shop profile, which can be found in Google SERPs alongside your seller rating, is where customers can deep dive into your online reputation.
Plenty of verified reviews can be found on Future Shop's shop profile page.
As a Google-partnered reviews platform, the reviews you collect with Trusted Shops can appear throughout the search engine. For example, here is how Future Shop's shop profile appears in the Google's search results:
Collecting plenty of reviews is essential to boosting your online reputation. Depending on the industry, the "right time" to ask for a review can vary. Because we realise every business is different, Trusted Shops makes it easy for shops to customise their review invitations. Asking at the right intervals can boost the likelihood of a response. Likewise, some consumers need a friendly reminder, so sending a followup email to ask for customer feedback is also easy to set up.
The Trustmark
Trusted Shops is the creator of Europe’s most recognised seal of approval (aka the Trustmark). The Trusted Shops Trustmark signifies that a website is compliant with industry best practices. A/B tests have shown that displaying the Trustmark on your site can boost conversions by 5-15% on average.
In order to earn the Trustmark, companies must pass an audit and have a customer rating of 3.5 or higher from verified reviews. Some of the criteria to pass this audit include the responsible handling of customer data, transparent communication, and reliable customer service.
There is a dedicated team at Trusted Shops to guide you through this audit and help you become compliant.
Read more about the Trusted Shops Trustmark.
Curious about the Trustmark's quality criteria? Download the whitepaper below to see how you can qualify!
30-Day Buyer Protection
It doesn't end with simply displaying the Trustmark. The 30-day Buyer Protection is the strength behind the Trustmark.
Shop owners that have earned the Trustmark can offer their customers the option to opt into the 30-day Buyer Protection (which is free for purchases under £2,500*). This protects shoppers in cases of legal returns or non-delivery.
*This value may vary per market.
The combination of the Trustmark and Buyer Protection can really help bridge the "trust gap" that exists when shoppers visit a website for the first time.
Read more about the Trusted Shops Buyer Protection.
The Trustbadge technology
The Trustmark, the Buyer Protection, and Service Reviews come together in the Trusted Shops Trustbadge®, an easy-to-integrate widget that you can display throughout your website.
The Trustbadge shows off the Trustmark throughout your website along with your average star-rating score.
Shoppers are reminded that the store has been approved by Trusted Shops and their fellow shoppers, and comes with a Buyer Protection as well. Because of this, the perceived risk factor for buying from an unknown website goes way down, thereby boosting a shop’s conversion rates.
Clicking on the Trustbadge opens another window (displayed next to the Trustbadge above) with more information about the Trustmark, Buyer Protection, and seller rating.
More trust solutions
With the Trustmark, Buyer Protection, and Service Reviews inside the Trustbadge, you've got an overview of our core products. However, Trusted Shops is continuously creating new products to increase trust between consumers and online shops. Here are some of our additional trust-building solutions:
Product Reviews
Although service reviews can benefit your brand's online reputation, product reviews are also a huge part of the consumer journey.
(Source: Meaco)
These days, product reviews need to be displayed on product pages, but they also appear in Google, both organically and in paid ads.
Besides providing social proof to your customers, you can also use product reviews to improve your product line. With authentic reviews from verified customers, you know you're getting honest opinions.
Another big benefit of product reviews is that shops tend to see a reduction in their return rate. When shoppers are well-informed thanks to customer feedback, they are more likely to complete a purchase knowing that this is the right product for them.
Google Integration
One of Trusted Shops' most popular products is the Google Integration.
If your shop runs Google Ads, the Google Integration tool is a perfect complement to your customer reviews (both Service Reviews and Product Reviews).
The most effective Google Ads display star ratings:
A Google Ad run by Future Shop shows off their shop's star ratings.
By working with a Google-certified reviews provider in Trusted Shops, you'll be able to automatically send your most recent reviews directly to the search engine. This action can help display your stars/ratings directly in your ads (i.e. text ads as well as Google Shopping ads), thus boosting your click-through rates and lowering your CPCs. More information on store ratings can be found on Google's support page.
Read more about Google Integration.
The Smart Review Assistant
Replying to reviews is also incredibly important to your brand image. This is particularly true for negative reviews, but it's also beneficial to reply to positive reviews as well.
Showing potential customers that you take customer feedback seriously reflects well on your reputation, especially your customer support. The problem is that if you collect a lot of reviews, replying to each one can be extremely time-consuming.
One of Trusted Shops' newest tools uses artificial intelligence to create thoughtful, unique, and relevant replies with the click of a button. Approve and publish or make small edits yourself. Either way, you'll save plenty of time boosting your reputation and brand image.
Read more about the Smart Review Assistant by clicking below:
The Reputation Manager
Any good shop owner knows they will receive a decent amount of traffic through Google. What you might not consider is that your shop often makes its first impression in search engines.
If a potential customer decides to research your company, they will often search "shop name + reviews" in Google. What often appears in the first results are third-party review providers, like Trusted Shops or Trustpilot.
If the ratings there seem to contradict each other, that could confuse users and therefore make them hesitate to buy from you.
With the Reputation Manager, Trusted Shops allows you to send review invitations for many of these other popular platforms (including Google Reviews and Trustpilot) automatically, even if you're not a member there.
By dispersing your review requests, you can easily send users to these other platforms in order to boost and harmonise your ratings on Google, thus building more trust to curious shoppers.
Read more about the Reputation Manager here.
Sentiment Analysis
The Sentiment Analysis tool is one of Trusted Shops' newest products.
Designed to help customers who collect a lot of reviews, Sentiment Analysis helps businesses make more sense of their valuable feedback.
Using artificial intelligence, Sentiment Analysis scans the entirety of your customer reviews and gives you insights into what is working in your shop and what areas need improvement.
With this data, you can make the decisions that will take you even closer to being a 5-star online shop.
Learn more about Sentiment Analysis by clicking below:
Trusted Shops has the receipts
Trusted Shops works hard to create trust solutions for online shops. With dedicated customer success and account managers, we help you implement our solutions in the best way for your unique shop.
Over the years, we've partnered together with some loyal clients... and we wanted to share some of their stories.
Head over to our Client page in order to read about the different success stories with the different trust solutions we've mentioned in this article.
Conclusion
Building trust for your website is definitely possible. With the help of Trusted Shops, over 30,000 online shops have earned the trust of new customers while improving (or creating) their online reputations.
However, this was just a brief summary of what Trusted Shops can do for an online shop.
Want to talk to one of our consultants who can walk you through our products? Head to our Contact Us page and we'll get back to you as soon as possible!
