November 23 2016 Jeff White
One of biggest concerns with any ecommerce site is the safety and security of your customers’ personal information. More than three quarters of website visitors are concerned about their personal information being intercepted or stolen. Since online purchases will grow to nearly two trillion dollars by the end of 2016, it’s essential to present a trustworthy image to your site visitors to ensure they feel comfortable completing a purchase with you.
Obviously, if you’re running an ecommerce site, you’re well aware of the importance of keeping your customer’s personal information secure. You can have a system in place that is fully up to date, security tested, and verified using a premium ecommerce platform such as Magento or Shopify and still appear untrustworthy. Follow these seven tips to make your prospects feel safe making an online purchase.
1. SSL: Make your entire site secure
Up until a few years ago, SSL certificates (the piece of encryption software on your web server that causes your website URL to display with a lock icon) were only really common on checkout pages and other areas where private information was being shared between parties. However, with Google declaring that it’s going to give precedence in search results to sites with https connections, it makes sense to serve every page on a website using encryption.
You probably already have an SSL certificate provisioned for your ecommerce site—unless it’s partially hosted on a platform like Shopify, with the rest of the site on another content management system. Have your website provider turn on SSL for the entire site and test it to make sure you see the green lock icon in the browser throughout the content pages. In the very near future, web browsers such as Chrome will show even more prominent warnings when users are browsing sites that are not secure on every page.
There are a few pitfalls to watch out for as you make the transition to a fully encrypted site:
- Make sure that permanent redirects are configured so that non-SSL pages get forwarded to the encrypted variants. You don’t want to lose any search juice you’ve worked hard to attain.
- Pulling elements such as images, calls to action, or other components into an otherwise encrypted page will cause the lock icon to disappear in favour of a page with ‘mixed sources’. Even though these images don’t cause your site to be insecure, the visitor’s impression is that the page isn’t as safe as it should be.
- Keep your certificate up to date. You don’t want your encryption failing because your website provider failed to renew it. Work with a partner that will auto-renew all essential certificates
2. Don’t store more personal information than you absolutely need
With all of the widely-publicized site data hacks lately, it’s important to do everything you can to be a good steward of your customer’s information. If Sony and LinkedIn can be hacked, you’re probably not immune. To mitigate any potential issues, only save the transactional information you absolutely require to complete the sale. If at all possible, use a secure tunnel to your credit card gateway to have the actual financial transaction process off-site, rather than directly on your own site. As convenient as it may be for your customers, do not save a copy of their credit card details anywhere within your platform. It’s still possible to provide recurring payment options directly with your processor, thereby removing your own liability.
3. For medical sites, ensure that you are HIPAA compliant
Further to the previous point around storage of personal data, if you are a US-based medical cannabis retailer who sells primarily to patients with a prescription, you may be required to conform to HIPAA legislation to manage medical records and communication. As such, anything that can be personally identifiable is required to be encrypted and stored with great care. In fact, many of the major inbound marketing and marketing automation platforms (such as HubSpot) explicitly forbid the storage of personally identifiable medical information on their system within their terms of service.
Other marketing automation platforms such as LuxSci have sprung up to meet the needs of healthcare practitioners who require HIPAA-compliant secure storage of personal data. These platforms are not as full-featured as inbound market leaders like HubSpot or others, but they do allow you to create workflows and landing pages among other features.
Be sure to include a link to your privacy policy in a prominent area on the site, and include information about how your organization fully complies with all HIPAA regulations. Have your efforts vetted by an accredited HIPAA auditor, and keep all certifications fully up to date as your organization grows.
4. Include trust badges on your site
A trust badge is a logo placed on an ecommerce site to prove that the site is secure. They usually represent an SSL certificate brand or other security scanning software. While it may look a little messy to include a security logo soup in the layout of your pages, there is research to suggest that those sites that include a trusted security badge on checkout pages perform better and convert at a higher rate than those without the images.
However, not all badges are seen as equal by consumers. Brand awareness really matters here—badges from major consumer anti-virus software makers such as Symantec and McAfee have the most appeal to ecommerce customers. In fact, 76% of ecommerce purchasers have actually cancelled a transaction simply because they didn’t recognize the trust badge on a site.
Even if you’ve secured everything on your site with SSL and have an excellent trust rating with your customers, if you’re not communicating it to visitors with the appropriate visual signals, you may be leaving money on the table.
5. Optimize your checkout process
Have you ever excitedly added items to an online shopping cart, only to be dumbfounded by an atrocious checkout process that caused you to abandon your purchase? It happens more than you’d think. A convoluted checkout dramatically decreases consumer confidence and makes it less likely that people will purchase from your site.
Consider using heatmaps and visitor recording to see if your ecommerce system is flummoxing site visitors. Watch for users who stumble at various points in the process. Make it as easy as possible for buyers to enter their information, but don’t overwhelm them with too many fields all at once. Is shipping information easy to find and understand? Is there any information that isn’t absolutely crucial for the transaction to be processed? If so, you may want to remove those fields from the checkout flow.
Making it easy to complete a purchase is a surefire way to increase conversions. A process that is people-focused gives buyers the sense that they are dealing with a professional organization that understands their needs. Although the shopping cart pages are critical to this experience, the entire site should be clean, easy to use, and focused on the visitor.
6. Include a real address and phone number
I can hear you now—we’re an internet business with no physical location! We don’t want phone calls or people showing up at our offices! However, in these early days of cannabis legalization it’s a bit of a wild west out there—simply showing that you’re a real company with real people that can be contacted by phone should something go awry helps to elevate your company above the rest of the chaff. Very few people will actually take the opportunity to reach out by phone or mail, but they want to know that they can. Have you ever wanted to someone for support at Amazon? Good luck with that. Even if your aspirations are Amazon-sized, it’s important to recognize the needs of your customers and prospects. To feel safe in making an online purchase, many will want to feel that they are dealing with an organization that they can easily contact should something go wrong. On top of that, having a legitimate business address on the site will help with local SEO efforts.
7. Publish product reviews from real people, even if they’re not happy
Nobody’s perfect. However, if every product review on your ecommerce website is a five star positive and glowing endorsement, potential customers will notice the imbalance. While reviews are one of the most important ways to show social proof around the quality of a product or service and how happy customers are with it, don’t go overboard pruning your reviews. Whenever possible, take the opportunity to engage with unsatisfied customers publically, and offer a way for them to get in touch privately to resolve the issue. Prospects will realize that they’re dealing with an organization that cares about the outcome—and even if someone was unhappy, they’ll see that you were willing to work to resolve the issue.
It’s ok to delete extremely rude or offensive reviews, but you should still take the opportunity to help those unhappy customers so that they don’t continue to leave unhappy reviews on your site or on social media where you cannot control the message as easily. Leaving less than positive reviews in place will serve to make users more comfortable, not less. Also, if you do manage to mend fences with an unhappy customer, don’t ask them to amend their review. On the flip side, take the time to thank happy customers on your site.
Wrapping up
Implementing an ecommerce platform, even in 2016 is still a major undertaking, despite the tools that have sprung up to make it easier. Being successful at online retailing is another matter altogether and, as cannabis becomes more mainstream, it will be important for businesses in this new and burgeoning industry to follow best practices as they get up and running. Ensuring that your potential customers feel secure and confident in making an online purchase is essential. The seven tips outlined here will not only help your online store appear trustworthy, they’ll protect your business and your customers’ personal information.
