A quick guide to building trust online

South African businesses are making a great migration to ecommerce, but their customers are wary to follow.

There’s a general lack of trust in the idea of handing over payment details to a brand they haven’t seen in brick and mortar before, never mind the fear of their purchases not even arriving at all.

• Click here to learn more about the Peach Payments payment gateway.

It’s up to South African ecommerce businesses to break this barrier by providing trust cues and encouraging happy customers to report on their experiences.

Sell like the big dogs

Your site is your shopfront, so make sure it doesn’t make users feel like they’re doing business in a grimy back alley.

Not only does your site have to be beautiful, but your user experience has to be a natural, intuitive flow from product pick to purchase. Even if you’re planning on building your ecommerce site yourself, it’s highly recommended that you take the time to understand your customer’s journey. You could also partner with a marketing agency who can help drive new customers to your store.

Making a payment

The biggest trust hurdle your potential customers will need to overcome is making a payment.

Even with consistent branding and messaging, professional interface design, and polished products, you need a final push to get customers to trust you with their credit card details.

Your best solution is to use a familiar payment gateway that customers will recognize from major online retailers that they already trust.

Online payment gateway providers like Peach Payments go the extra mile with their customer experience, ensuring the checkout process is smooth sailing and customer support is always available.

Cues to review

Even with your ecommerce site to-do list ticked, the journey you’re creating for your customer is only just beginning.

Now that you’ve built enough trust for them to make the leap of faith into a purchase, there are plenty of touchpoints along the way where you can reinforce trust, and even go the extra mile. HelloPeter has put together the ultimate guide to building an online reputation here.

It’s vital that you not only ensure that your customers experience that level of support at those touchpoints, but that you can capture their appreciation in review form.

There are two major touchpoints that serve as golden opportunities to ask for reviews: after sale and post-support.

In a post-support setting, a request for a review can be made directly within the line of communication between your support team and a customer, although one has to be careful not to turn an otherwise sincere conversation into a transactional dialogue.

Hellopeter makes this task easier and faster than any other method on the market. Learn more about what we can do for your business.

A follow-up mail asking for a review of the service your customer just received can be an efficient and automated solution that connects with your customers whilst the experience is still fresh in their minds.

By having an automated after-sale follow-up mail set up, it immediately shows your customer that your business still cares about their experience, even after you’ve taken their hard-earned cash.

You’ll get valuable business insights in return, and having these sorts of conversations with customers also creates a strong motivation for them to take the time to write a review on a major review platform because they understand how important that positive review is to you.

No matter how you ask for reviews, the most important thing is to make sure they’re captured somewhere where other customers can see them – such as Hellopeter.

Trust from start to finish

With every sale you make off your website, you get the opportunity to prove to your customers that not only can they trust you to deliver the goods they’ve ordered, but to keep their payment details safe as well.

When you wow them at every touchpoint, you increase the likelihood of good reviews, and with every good review, you build more trust in your brand. More trust means more sales – repeated forever.