My wife and I recently purchased some products from three sites we had never before used. I’m usually a little apprehensive about purchasing from a new online site because they haven’t yet established a relationship of trust.
The big thing that helps build trust for me is the professional appearance of a website. Take a look at the following three sites. Which one do you think would deliver the order accurately and in the most timely manner?
So my guess is whichever one you picked to be the best, it wasn’t dentaldepot.com. Well to our surprise, dentaldepot.com came through with a timely and accurate delivery. The other two sites left us wondering “where is our order?” for too long.
Judging a Book by its Cover
How many customers has dentaldepot.com never gained because its website isn’t quite as spiffy as it could be? What does your site look like to a new customer? What message is it sending? Amateur or professional? Trustworthy or shady?
Dress the Part
Your ecommerce efforts should be wrapped in a clean, usable, and professional-looking design. These characteristics are then associated with your company. If you really are a great customer-centric company, your website should convey that message.
Dress Up
You may be a small company with a limited budget. Nevertheless, the web is a great leveling field. You can compete with the big boys because you can look like them. Now, I’m not saying go and copy somebody’s design, but you can dress up your site so it is professional. Doing so will at least alleviate people’s fears when they first visit your site. Once they’ve gotten over the initial hurdle, you can take that trust and deliver a great customer experience.
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Chris
April 6, 2006
Hi, that’s a great article / post. I always end up helping clients build ecommerce and never think about the little things like this.
Chris
Joe Rawlinson
April 7, 2006
Thanks Chris. Hopefully if business owners don’t see the need for professional looking sites, those that build the websites can steer them in the right direction! Of course, if everyone worked with you at Tornado we wouldn’t have the dentaldepot.coms of the world.
dental depot
May 2, 2006
Chris; I was interested in your comments, however, We at the dental depot have found that a large majority of our customers are in the 50-70 year old range. These customers do not like the clutter of information on the home page but would rather slowly move through the site with large fonts and limited distraction(java, pop ups and sales banners). We are very succssful with our very though out design
Joe Rawlinson
May 3, 2006
Dental Depot-
I’m glad to see that you’re very aware of your target audience. This definitely helps you tailor your experience to those customers that you’re serving.