Trust seals, as well as customer reviews, are often incorporated by various online shops in order to illustrate their credentials. Although we know that trust seals are an important feature for e-commerce websites, idealo has conducted a study in order to find out which trust-building measures are most regularly found on the homepage. The study analysed online retailers in the UK, Spain, France, Germany, Italy and Poland and found that the results reveal a surprisingly wide variation between the countries.
The analysis shows, that the majority of European shops incorporate reviews on their homepage (55%). These include reviews of the shop itself as well as product reviews. This trust element is closely followed by the mention of an encrypted data service (50%). More than half of the online shops state that their shop is protected via SSL. A trust seal is present on the homepage to users in 48% of cases, followed by awards and/or prizes (21%) and test certificates (13%).
Customer Reviews
According to a study from 2013, 74 percent of respondents in Great Britain agreed that they will look at online reviews if they don't feel confident making a purchase. The idealo study confirms this, as 90% of UK shops ensure they have customer reviews present and display this on their homepage as a trust-building measure. This is followed by Poland (80%); Germany (50%) and finally France (38%), Italy (38%) and Spain (34%).
Trust Seals
“A trust seal verifies to visitors that a website is legitimate. Data is collected by the third-party trust seal company that confirms that the business is authentic.” (Crazyegg, 2014).
Trust seals provide a sense of perceived security to most users and are mostly used by Polish.
Most trust seals are uniform throughout Europe, however there are some countries that have their own trust seal such as Germany, sometimes displaying six different trust seals on their homepage in total. Whilst the UK leads when it comes to product reviews, UK online shops do not heavily rely on visible trust seals, with only 22% doing so.
Awards
Besides trust seals, many online shops also display prizes or awards they have won, which in turn may also increase the perceived trust.
This trust measure is most popular amongst Polish online shops, with 68% of shops displaying their awards on the homepage, followed by Germany with 40%. Even though many Polish and German shops rely on awards, the remaining countries avoid this trust measure, with only 6% of French, UK and Spanish and only 2% of Italian shops displaying what they have been awarded with.
Data Security
One concern consumers have while shopping online is whether their data is safe. Especially French online shops try to minimize this by displaying an SSL certificate (70%), next to the usual marks, such as green padlock signs and the “https://” in the browser window. About half of the Polish (58%), Italian (56%) and Spanish (54%) online retailers add the SSL certificate to their website. Surprisingly, the country known for data security efforts, Germany, ranks last behind the UK with 34%.
Test certificates
The least relevant trust signal for European online retailers are test certificates.
On average, only 13% of all European shops would list the results of quality tests by independent institutions on their website. Polish (42%) and German shops (26%) occasionally feature good results, whereas test certificates are completely ignored in France and the UK.
From a retailer’s perspective, it is crucial to evaluate which trust signals are important to
consumers in the respective country. One should also bear in mind not showing too many trust signals - it is about quality rather than quantity, as too many trust signals can confuse consumers and raise suspicion.
By Stefanie Kässens, idealo.co.uk.
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