Despite its strong growth as a marketing medium, e-commerce still leaves some consumers feeling uneasy. How can you help consumers to feel comfortable conducting business with you online?

• Place a small but prominent link to your privacy policy in the footer of every page of the web site.  In addition to other issues, address the use of cookies in the policy.
• Make sure that the booking engine runs on a secure server, so that the visitor can clearly see "https://" in the URL  (Believe it or not, some booking engines don’t have this!!)
• State prominently that the reservation pages are secure.
• Include a toll-free number on the booking pages for those who want to abandon the online booking process because of security concerns.
• Have a professional look to the site and the booking engine, along with up-to-date content, in order to build customer confidence about the integrity of the company and the security of the site. Remember, out of date specials look unprofessional.
• Study bounce rates and scenario analysis in your tracker to determine where visitors are dropping out of the process due to issues in usability, relevance, or the offer. Learn more about scenario analysis by visiting this page of Blizzard Internet Marketing’s blog.

Implementing these suggestions will foster a comfortable environment in which to make purchases online. The potential gains in revenue make reassuring internet users a worthwhile investment.

 

Christine Burke, Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc. 

 

Categories: Featured Articles.
Comments RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a comment, or trackback.