Which accreditations to go for?

[uprint]

Hi

Just wondering what the opinion was on accreditations for ecommerce sites? I've heard that displaying a logo from a recognised industry accreditation can improve conversions.

I was looking at the Safe Buy accreditation, do you think its worth the £100 p/a or is there a better alternative that will put peoples mind at ease when buying through our site?

Any opinions, links etc appreciated.

Cheers

Steve

[Ray Stewart]

so I think it is the fact you have secured the site at all that gives people comfort. As long as the little padlock is there, I don't look to closely as to which certificate they use.

[Coding Monkey]

You would be surprised at the impact of a certificate can make. Yet the impact is only in relation to your traffic. We've done testing and found a 15% increase in specific conversion processes from the placement and type of icon used, but these are on websites with significant traffic. It may take you a considerably longer time to make your money back on say a £1400/y Verisign certificate compared to doing a home page redesign if you're receiving less than 5,000 visitors a month to your site.

[Sumit]

You can give live help to the visitors by providing Live chat or any toll free number so that if customers find difficulty in getting the right product they can contact you.

[chillfire]

Hi Steve,

If you are using an online merchant system (HSBC e-payments, Paypal, google cart, Protx, worldpay, ect) then their name/brand should help with customer confidence, but the most important things to remember are make sure the SSL is used all the way through the process, keep the number of steps from 'add item' to 'give us your credit card details' as quick and as easy as possible.

The merchant or online payment gateway comapny should be able to point you in the right direction for what to display and when.

oh and if you are storing the data to manually in the site to put through a PDQ later on (yes there are sites that still do this) be careful...

cheers,
craig