How do you succeed in the fast-paced eCommerce market? Building and nurturing trust in your customer buying process can be an answer for your competitive edge and long-term eCommerce success.  

Trust comes from a positive shopping experience, which sounds simple yet takes a lot of work. This article presents a deep dive into essential facets of the trust-building process and five practical ways to foster trust in your Magento eCommerce business. 

You will find a comprehensive walkthrough of what you should implement and what tools to optimize the pre-purchase and post-purchase customer experience.  

Why is it Important to Build Trust for Customers? 

Trust plays an elemental role in the success and sustainability of an eCommerce business, which seems an undeniable fact. But what positive effects can your potential customers’ trust generate?

Increase Conversion Rate 

Online purchases require sharing personal information like names, addresses, phone numbers, and payment details. Thus, online shoppers only buy products from the stores that have gained their trust. Your conversion rates will grow if your business can show prestige, legitimate operations, and privacy protection security.

Boost Repeat Customer Rate 

Repeat customer rate indicates the percentage of customers who have purchased from your Magento store more than once during a certain time period. Keeping this figure high proves that you succeed in establishing and nurturing trust with customers; hence, they come back and buy more items. 

Gain More Customers Through Referrals

If you have customers who trust your products’ quality and services, they might recommend your brand to their friends and families. Along these lines,  your customer base will grow thanks to such referrals. 

Word-of-mouth is still among the most effective marketing approaches, as recommendations from a person’s network circles outweigh advertisements or online reviews. 

Enhance Customer Loyalty

Trust is the result of consistently good experiences with your store. If your business keeps delivering high-quality products and excellent service as well as meeting or exceeding their expectations, your customers are more likely to become loyal. 

Strengthen Your Brand Position 

Building trust enhances the credibility of your Magento store and fosters long-term customer relationships. As a result, your brand can stand out and consistently thrive in the highly competitive eCommerce market. 

5 Ways to Earn Credibility in the Consumer Buying Process

Insights into the customer journey will greatly help you map out feasible strategies to boost your lead generation and conversion rates. 

Trust in eCommerce is the factor you should not only build in the pre-purchase process but also maintain and strengthen during and after the purchase. What should you do to achieve that? 

We’ll walk you through some tried-and-true tips for building trust in your customer’s decision-making process. 

1. Improve the UX/UI of Your eCommerce Site 

When a lead accesses your eCommerce website, its interface and operation will act as your business’s storefront. A user-friendly interface with a professional and dynamic web design can strike a good impression and make your potential customers attach your business with reliability and quality commitment.  

So, you should focus on improving your eCommerce site’s UX/UI (User Experience/User Interface) to provide a smooth browsing experience with your target audience. Here’s a brief guide on the factors your website should have. 

• Clear navigation: An intuitive and navigable structure means that users can easily find what they’re looking for without confusion when they visit your website. 
• Responsive design: Make sure that your website is accessible and functional across various devices and screen sizes of desktops, tablets, and mobile devices. 
• Fast loading speed: Users tend to leave websites that take too long to load, so optimizing your website’s loading speed is crucial to creating a positive experience. 
• Readability and legibility: Use clear fonts, appropriate font sizes, and appropriate contrast between text and background to make your website easy to read. 

In terms of creating an optimal UX/UI, Magento’s features can provide a huge advantage for Magento eCommerce websites. Its open source allows you to customize your unique brand experience and flexibly adapt to the display on different devices without affecting your web’s loading speed. 

2. Set Up an SSL Certificate

SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate validifies a website’s identity and security. The signal to recognize the website with SSL is its domain having  “https://” or the key icon of secure connection. 

When visiting your website, if customers see the ‘Not Secure’ notice in the search box, it will likely stop them from staying on your website any longer. This explains why an SSL certificate setup can build trust in your customer buying process. 

Having an SSL certificate is not just for show; it actually protects your customers’ privacy and mitigates risks of phishing attacks, especially securing payment transactions in the checkout process. 

Another factor is that websites with SSL get higher ranks in the SERP (Search Engine Result Page), which helps your eCommerce store be more accessible and reliable. 

3. Provide Vital Information 

Another factor that builds trust in the initial stage of the consumer decision-making process is that you should present sufficient vital information. 

Your leads might find your website’s design impressive and smooth browsing, yet the poor content or ambiguous writing of essential facets might get them to leave your eCommerce store. 

Along these lines, your web content should have your interest and investment in terms of time, effort, and manpower to make sure your leads get enough information for their purchase. 

Product Information and Reviews 

• Clear product description: Your product descriptions must include features, specifications, functions, prices, warranty, and other crucial notes. Photos and videos will be great for better illustrations. As a result, online shoppers can feel assured of the products without physically checking. 
• Usage guidelines: Along with the product description, you can add content to guide customers to use your products effectively and share crucial heads-ups. It will be especially helpful if your products require prerequisites or are highly specialized. 
• Public customer reviews: Sharing customers’ real reviews of your products and services helps online shoppers collect more insights into the products’ quality and the services you serve. Such transparency can greatly build their trust in your store. 

Transparent Pricing, Payment, and & Return Policies  

You should make the information about these three money-related aspects as concise as possible, as it can reduce customers’ uncertainty and establish a sense of security. 

• Detailed pricing information: 
  • List all the associated costs in your customer’s order, such as the product’s price, shipping fees, taxes, and any other charges.
  • Inform them of any additional fees beforehand so that they’re not surprised when proceeding with checkout, which helps enhance this process’s transparency. 
  • Be clear about the currency of your prices, which saves your international customer base from getting confused or mistaken. 
• Succinct content about return policies: The content about the conditions under which customers can return products and get refunds should be in simple and concise language. 
• Clear-cut explanation of promotion programs: The content of promotion programs should clearly explain what the program offers and its conditions so that you won’t have to deal with customers’ misunderstandings or benefit conflicts. 
• Transparency in payment: Optimizing the checkout process is key to showing transparency in the payment process. Before the checkout, you should display payment methods and the total cost with any applied coupons/discount codes.

Content Marketing 

You should produce more insightful content for your target audience, especially educating them on the essentials of choosing and tips for using products. Your expertise and professional business will impress your customers or potential ones. 

Various and on-point content also supports SEO efforts, which considerably improves your eCommerce website’s ranking in the search engine. Appearing on the top page position of search results will add more credit to your business. 

Contact Touchpoints

Online shoppers can’t trust an eCommerce store if the business comes from nowhere. That’s why online interactions and detailed contact information can tremendously contribute to your business’s credibility.

• Diversify contact channels/methods: You should also take advantage of social media channels as your direct contact touchpoints with customers, not only the hotline number. Diversifying contact channels based on your customer behaviors can increase your accessibility and credibility online.  
• Placing contact information in prominent areas: You can add contact icons or box chat for support on your eCommerce site, so customers can conveniently reach you whenever they have questions/concerns or need detailed information about the products or services. 
• Add your offline address: If you have a brick-and-mortar store, state its address clearly in the footer of your website. Your real-world presence can enormously build a trustworthy business image. 

Such information shows your understanding of the products and your commitment to the business’s integrity. As a result, those who have never bought your products become more confident to make their first purchase and come back to buying more in the future. 

4. Offer Exceptional Customer Support

A customer support team providing customers responsive assistance is among the best ways to show your seriousness and dedication to your eCommerce business development.  

Some following approaches are to build excellent customer support to stand out in the market. 

• Provide 24/7 available support: eCommerce opens the chance to shop anytime and anywhere. Having a 24/7 team helps you accommodate customers in different time zones and avoid missing out on any potential leads. 
• Trained support team: You should train your support team in crucial knowledge about products, return & refund policies, and the skill sets of handling warranty claims or tough complaints from customers. Building a knowledge base and FAQs can enhance your team’s performance and service quality. 
• Personalize customer interactions: You can build a database about customers and potential leads, such as their personal information, purchase history, and concerns they have had. Thus, every support staff can address every individual by name and have information about their problems without asking again. 
• Automate your system: You can use tools to automate the process of managing warranty claims and responding to customers’ questions. It can cut down on your manpower while providing your customers with prompt support. 

When customers need support, especially in times of issues with systems,  technicals, or shipping delays, the support team plays a vital role in crisis management. 

Clear and transparent communication during such situations helps maintain customer trust, which prevents a drop in sales, increases repeat sales, and spreads good word-of-mouth. 

5. Use Reliable & Secure Supporting Tools/Software

Database between your brick-and-mortar and online stores can be out of sync as manual management can lead to mistakes and errors. The vast amount of information that needs updating can be order-making from both online and offline sources, order status, available inventory, promotional activities, and loyalty campaigns. 

It makes your staff have to handle a huge workload to sync the database and fix possible errors manually; hence, they can ensure the process swiftly transitions from online to offline stores and vice versa. 

Besides, payment hacks or personal information leaks are the risks that customers are now cautious of whenever making payments, regardless of online and offline purchases.

Combining all of these things, your retail business should have a smooth process of order-making and secure payment transactions both online and offline to leave a good impression on your brand quality and strengthen your customers’ trust in your business. 

Otherwise, their customer satisfaction and trust will be profoundly impacted.  Business and profits might tremendously deteriorate if you take no action to improve their shopping experience. 

Hence, you should have effective tools that streamline the retail management process to save time, reduce errors from doing manual paperwork, and raise the team’s productivity. Thus, your customer’s experience can get better every time. 

POS Systems

You can use POS systems like Magento 2 POS to alleviate your daily order creation and checkouts with a synced database of products, orders, and customers. 

The tool will be especially helpful for your management of both online and offline stores as essential data of both sources is in sync. It also allows you to integrate with many marketplaces effortlessly. Hence, you can swiftly provide your customers with products and timely support everywhere. 

Besides, Magento 2 POS’s Store Pickup features support you to offer flexible buying methods, e.g. buying online and picking up at the store, buying in-store and shipping to their home, or creating orders online and paying at the store.

The tool also helps enhance your relationships with customers hence they won’t buy just once but many times after that. Its features enable you to run the same loyalty programs, both online and in-store while personalizing your customers’ experience with promotion campaigns based on their purchases and their loyalty points. 

Return Management Systems

Trust building isn’t enough for your sustainable business development; you need to nurture the relationship with your customers even after their purchase. 

ReturnGO puts its name on the map as the world’s leading sustainable returns management platform. Its superior features facilitate you to easily manage online product returns. One of the big advantages it offers is a custom solution matching your store’s policies. 

The reason for such amazing functions is ReturnGO’s various tools to streamline the process of returns, exchanges, and order tracking. It gets insights into your return windows, sale items, item categories, customer history, and even customer segmentation to create unmatched return, refund, and exchange policies. 

These tools can level up your services while cutting down on manpower and management costs. Customers can enjoy an easy, fast, and convenient process; hence, their satisfaction with your services increases.

The results are increased repeat customer rates and positive word-of-mouth for generating more leads and boosting conversion rates. 

Conclusion

Trusted eCommerce brands attract more leads and have higher conversion rates. Thus, gaining and nurturing trust during the customer buying process become priorities in many eCommerce stores’ development strategies. 

eCommerce shopping happens online, which explains why you should optimize your website’s UX/UI with solid techniques and concise content while enhancing its security with the setup of SSL certificates. 

Don’t forget to apply effective tools that can streamline all the strategies and tactics across your online and offline store.

Magento 2 POS can support you in taking care of creating trust in the whole customer buying process. If you are looking for custom solutions to improve your post-purchase process, contact ReturnGO for further consultation.