[Sigia-l] "seals of approval" for Web sites

[Jonathan Baker-Bates]

On 4 January 2011 14:29, Dan Chamberlain <dan.chamberlain at dom.com> wrote:

> All,
>
> I would like to hear some thoughts around "seals of approval" for Web
> sites. For example: an organization or vendor reviews your site and then
> awards you with an icon that symbolizes the sites Security or Usability.  Do
> users respect these or ignore them? If you use them, do you place them at
> the bottom or top of the page? Which are the most trusted?
>


I've observed a pretty consistent faith placed in such seals (Verisign,
eTrust), with people often spontaneously pointing them out in checkout paths
as reasons to trust the vendor. We have sometimes probed for their level of
understanding of what these marks mean, but most people seem not to know
much about it beyond a vague association with "trust" that they feel
comfortable with. This also applies to the other very common observation of
people looking for the "little padlock" in their browser. Very few people
can articulate what that actually means, but (for now at least) it doesn't
seem to matter to them. In Germany, a TUV compliance mark is a big deal, and
is well understood, so it definitely gets noticed and respected by
customers.

Consequently, we place them in the most prominent positions we can (usually
next to credit card input, but also elsewhere). We relegate them to page
footers outside the checkout path though, since we also observe hardly
anyone caring about payment issues much before they get serious about a
purchase.

The only exception to this that I've found is in China (lab tests with 20
customers in Shanghai last December), where most people make online payments
via their banks. They don't have much reason to look for trust marks, since
they assume their bank has done the due diligence before hand for them. This
is also anecdotally the case for some consumers in India, although I've not
verified that.

Jonathan






<http://www.youtube.com/domcorpcomm>