Since their beginnings, brands and branding have been used primarily to earn and maintain customer trust. When a consumer recognizes a familiar brand, they form certain expectations about everything from product quality and price to characteristics like flavor, stylishness, or reliability. Companies collectively spend billions of dollars annually trying to shape consumer perceptions of their brands, and, though the particular selling points differ, it all boils down to one thing: customer trust.
Customer Trust in the Online Marketplace
Branding and trust are critical in the online marketplace, where consumers are forced to decide whether or not to put their faith in a particular business without most of the indicators we traditionally rely upon when evaluating, say, a brick-and-mortar electronics store. If purchasing a product online, we cannot see and touch it prior to sale; we cannot observe whether or not there are any other customers in the store; we rarely interact with any human salespeople; and, by and large, we cannot gauge whether it is a well-established business or a scam that could disappear overnight, along with our financial information. Even if we already recognize and trust a particular brand, how can we truly know when doing business online that we are dealing with the authentic business and not some imposter?
The Role of Online Customer Trust in the Purchase Decision
Academic research has conclusively established that trust plays a major role in consumers’ online purchasing decisions, with brand image and security having a positive impact on customer trust, and trust, in turn, having a positive effect on the purchase decision. Conversely, perceived risk has a negative impact on trust, which negatively impacts the purchase decision. (1)
“Brand image has been proven to play a role as an antecedent of trust,” the authors of a February 2020 study concluded based on a statistical analysis of their data. “Seller’s brand image has a positive effect on consumer trust before they make online purchase[s]. The better the brand image of the seller, which is reflected through brand excellence, brand strength, and brand uniqueness, the higher the consumer’s trust.” (1)
Hence, the goal of every online business should be to improve trust by maximizing brand image and security while minimizing perceived risk. But how can this be accomplished in the digital realm?
Building and Maintaining Online Customer Trust with Trust Badges and Seals
One of the best ways for a business to prove that they are who they say they are on the internet is via third-party verification. Third-party verification is hardly an invention of the internet age, though the anonymity of digital commerce has made verification more relevant than ever. In the brick-and-mortar world, we have long-since grown accustomed to using symbols of third-party verification to ensure that products are truly organic, or gluten free, or kosher. One reason why these verification systems are so widespread is because they work: a survey by NSF found that 85% of consumers trusted independent third-parties to certify certain claims about a product. With consumers already accustomed to using analog trust badges in their everyday lives, the transition to using digital verifiers online should be a smooth, and welcome, one.
Third-party verification can come in several different forms, whether it be a trust badge, trust seal, checkout badge, or secure payment badge. Whatever shape it takes, the purpose is the same: to demonstrate to potential customers that a trusted outside source has verified that you are a legitimate, reliable business.
Additionally, some third-party verification companies, such as Truly Legit, offer trust badges or trust seals that include services like security scans to help detect vulnerabilities in your website and protect you and your customers from hackers and other malicious actors. Again, perceptions of security and perceived risk have been proven to weigh heavily on customer trust, which in turn impacts the purchase decision.
While trust seals and trust badges have the potential to improve customer faith in your brand, not all third-party verification services are created equal. At one end of the spectrum are trust badges and seals that are nothing more than images placed on a website. A simple web search will yield countless examples of instructions for “creating your own trust badge.” Such practices amount to essentially the same kind of dishonest, deceptive behavior that trust badges and seals are intended to prevent in the first place, giving potential customers the illusion of security with nothing to back it up. A little further along the spectrum are actual companies that offer so-called pay-to-play verification, selling their “trust badges” to any company willing to pay for it, while performing none of the due diligence or verification that a trust seal is supposed to signify. Finally, on the complete other end of the spectrum from these phony badges are verification services, such as Truly Legit, that actually perform rigorous due diligence prior to approving an applicant company, providing customers with the assurances they demand in making their purchasing decisions.
Whether you are an established brand looking to maintain your hard-earned image or a relatively new business seeking to introduce yourself to potential customers and establish a foothold in the marketplace, third-party verification is an important tool for earning and keeping customer trust.
Trust Badges for Websites of Established Brands
Companies spend millions of dollars and years or even decades building their brands, and yet corporate history is littered with examples of brands whose public image went from extremely positive to horrifyingly negative literally overnight. While some of these instances were the result of the company’s own actions, oftentimes, brand image can be irreparably harmed by circumstances completely beyond the knowledge or control of the business in question. For example, if the public perception is that scammers frequently use your brand as a cover for shady dealings, your customer trust will take a hit, which ultimately will impact them at the time of the purchase decision. Similarly, if you suffer a massive data breach due to the malicious activities of criminal actors, customer perception of the trustworthiness of your brand will take a nosedive.
Third-party verification services such as Truly Legit provide consumers with assurances as to the legitimacy of a particular company website as well as that company’s data protection and security practices, helping to maintain the brand strength you’ve worked so hard to build and paying dividends at the time of the purchase decision. Need to ensure customers that they are dealing with your actual company and not an imposter? Tell them they can verify for themselves via the embedded trust badge.
Trust Badges for Websites of Established Brands
Companies spend millions of dollars and years or even decades building their brands, and yet corporate history is littered with examples of brands whose public image went from extremely positive to horrifyingly negative examples of brands whose images suffered due to a loss of customer trust. While some of these instances were the result of the company’s own actions, oftentimes, brand image can be irreparably harmed by circumstances completely beyond the knowledge or control of the business in question.
For example, if the public perception is that scammers frequently use your brand as a cover for shady dealings, your customer trust will take a hit, which ultimately will impact them at the time of the purchase decision. Even a brand as large and established as Amazon is not immune from the impact that scammers can have on consumer trust. Before instituting a massive crackdown in 2021, Amazon warned investors and regulators through its financial disclosures that the sale of counterfeit goods on its platform represented a serious threat to the brand in the eyes of both customers as well as the makers and sellers of authentic goods. (Associated Press. Amazon blocked 10 billion listings in counterfeit crackdown. (10 May 2021)). Even for the behemoth Amazon, if customers do not trust the authenticity of the product, they will decline to complete their purchases, which is reflected in Amazon’s 1% decline in online sales during the fourth quarter of 2021[Forbes], during which time Amazon scams were getting significant play in the media and were impacting a record number of customers [FTC]. [Petro, Greg. Consumer Sustainability Concerns Threaten Amazon’s Ecommerce Juggernaut. Forbes. (25 March 2022). Fletcher, Emma. Amazon tops list of impersonated businesses. Federal Trade Commission. Consumer Protection Data Spotlight. 20 October 2021). ]
Amazon faces serious trust issues on other fronts, as well. According to the Federal Trade Commission, people falsely claiming to represent Amazon scammed consumers out of $27 million in the year from July 2020 through June 2021, during which time approximately 96,000 individual “business impersonation” complaints involving Amazon were filed. This represented not only a five-times increase over the previous year, but also one out of every three business-impersonation complaints registered. [Fletcher, Emma. Amazon tops list of impersonated businesses. Federal Trade Commission. Consumer Protection Data Spotlight. 20 October 2021]. This goes to show that even a brand as massive as Amazon, with seemingly infinite resources to pour into growing, protecting, and maintaining its image, can face serious challenges with customer trust. In fact, the more your brand grows and its image improves, the more it will represent a prime target for fraudsters looking to exploit the trust and goodwill you have built.
Just as scammers and fraudsters can impact your business’s image, if you suffer a massive data breach due to the malicious activities of criminal actors, customer perception of the trustworthiness of your brand will take a nosedive. A Harris Poll conducted on behalf of IBM found that, no matter how wonderful a customer thinks a product is, 75% of them will not buy that product from a company if they do not believe the company can keep their data safe. Similarly, 78% of respondents said that a company’s data protection practices are “extremely important.” (IBM. New Survey Finds Deep Consumer Anxiety over Data Privacy and Security. PR Newswire. (16 April 2018)) Further, a 2022 IBM report on the cost of data breaches to businesses found that, on average, the amount of lost business as a result of a data breach averaged $1.42 million, the first time in six years that lost business costs did not amount for the largest portion of data-breach-related expenses. Lost business includes not only “business disruption and revenue losses from system downtime” but also “cost of lost customers and acquiring new customers” as well as “reputation losses and diminished goodwill.” (IBM Security. Cost of a Data Breach Report 2022. (2022))
Third-party verification services such as Truly Legit provide consumers with assurances as to the legitimacy of a particular company website as well as that company’s data protection and security practices, helping to maintain the brand strength you’ve worked so hard to build and paying dividends at the time of the purchase decision. Need to ensure customers that they are dealing with your actual company and not an imposter? Tell them they can verify for themselves via the embedded trust badge.