-
When a small padlock appears in the corner of your Web browser’s address bar or the entire bar turns green, it seems like a powerful signal you’re safe to proceed. But experts say the SSL certificates those green lights signify — digital stamps of approval that Web sites buy to prove they’re running a legitimate business and can send and receive encrypted data safely — don’t provide the safety they seem to. "They instill some sense of security, but that could be a dangerously false sense of security," said Paul Mutton, a researcher with UK-based security firm Netcraft Ltd. The site itself could still be riddled with security holes for hackers to exploit. And the certificate could simply be bogus: Criminals have been forging them to get the padlock icon and dress up fraudulent sites.
-
During the Web’s heyday, a profitable Internet company nearing $100 million in annual sales while luring a million new customers a month would have found itself on the IPO fast track. But that’s hardly the case for LinkedIn, a professional networking site that has cleared those hurdles and then some. Instead, LinkedIn is hewing closely to the Web economy’s new motto on initial public offerings: Easy does it. Founded in 2003, LinkedIn may not sell shares until some time next year. Likewise, social networking site Facebook, worth $15 billion on paper, may not go public until 2010,
Category: Trust and Safety Page 2 of 5
I had the opportunity to speak at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania last week about an article that Dr. Eric Clemons recently authored for the Journal of Management Information Systems, "An Empirical Investigation of Third-Party Seller Rating Systems in E-Commerce: The Case of buySAFE". My presentation was focused on marketplace economics and specifically about information asymmetry, signaling, the "Market for Lemons" concept, and buySAFE. In addition, I was able to share a few thoughts about my entrepreneurial experience with buySAFE.
As always, I had a great time as the guest of Dr. Eric Clemons, and I enjoyed hearing the passionate questions, insights and feedback from the students. One of the students posted an article about my visit on his blog, The Un-Wharton.
AuctionBytes.com, one of my favorite ecommerce news sources, is conducting another survey to study online shopping behavior. The survey explores a number of areas that are important for small business ecommerce merchants to fully understand about their customers. If you have a few extra minutes, I encourage you to complete this survey. Ina Steiner, the editor, will publish the survey results in a few weeks, and I will make sure to share with you as well.
You can complete the survey here >> http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=vX4t6OvcNW0_2fO8NFL8pFuA_3d_3d
How can you drive up your holiday revenue? Build trust with your buyers!
That’s right. By simply spending a bit of time and energy thinking about how your consumers do their searching, shopping, and decision-making, you can increase your holiday revenues in a material fashion.
On Wednesday, October 24, 2007 at 11:00-12:00 PM MDT, I will be giving an educational webinar sponsored by Infopia and buySAFE on the subject of building trust with your buyers to drive up your revenues and
profits.
If you can spare an hour of your time, I promise you that you will learn something
new and interesting. If you are serious about building your online business, this will be time well spent.
Space is limited, so please register for the webinar as soon as you get a moment. You can register at https://www.gotomeeting.com/register/890705170.
Related articles:
“Infopia Integrates with buySAFE” – Infopia Blog
This week, buySAFE and ScanAlert, the provider of the Hacker Safe service, announced a huge partnership, and in my opinion, this is a great development for e-commerce.
Under the terms of the deal, ScanAlert will provide buySAFE’s Certified Merchant solution for free to its merchants during the HACKER SAFE account activation process and from within the account management console. In addition, buySAFE will make ScanAlert’s PCI validation services available to its merchants for free as well. This is truly a terrific combination for merchants and buyers.
Obviously, buyers want to find the right product at the right price. Once that has been accomplished, buyers basically care about two things when considering whether or not to make a purchase online…
- Am I going to get what I pay for?
- Is my private information going to be safe?
buySAFE is the best in the world at making sure buyers will get what they paid for. buySAFE does this by rigorously inspecting its merchants’ sales experience, online reputation, identity, and financial stability. Then, buySAFE monitors the merchant’s transactional history, in real time, for any sign of transactional or business default. Finally and perhaps most importantly, buySAFE puts its money where its mouth is bonding the transactions of buySAFE merchants up to $25,000 per transaction if requested.
Hacker Safe is amongst the best in the world at ensuring that buyers’ private information is going to be safe. They accomplish this goal by performing daily vulnerability scanning of their merchants’ websites. This helps to make sure that the merchants’ websites are secure and difficult for bad guys to breach.
Both companies are industry leaders in the online trust, safety and security world, and both have thousands of merchant customers using their services.
Again, it important for merchants to understand that their shoppers are concerned with two things… and Will I get what I paid for, and is my private information going to be safe? Optimal web site conversion metrics can only be achieved by answering both of these questions credibly. Together, buySAFE and ScanAlert are a powerful combination that will benefit merchants, buyers, and the entire e-commerce industry.
Related articles:
"buySAFE & HACKER SAFE in a Ground Breaking Announcement – Enabling Risk-Free eCommerce" on the buySAFE blog
"BuySafe Partners with ScanAlert/Hackersafe and CRE Loaded" on AuctionBytes.com
In this "scam of the month", Judge Judy takes on an eBay fraudster and ultimately hands out the maximum punishment. In spite of the fact that this scam seems audaciously ridiculous, it is actually quite common online. Bottom-line, there are a lot of folks out there that lack any semblance of a moral compass.
My inspiration for starting buySAFE was a similar scam that I fell victim to on eBay during the summer of 2000. The only major differences that I can point to are that I purchased a $400 PDA, and instead of taking the scammer to court with Judge Judy, I decided to instead start a company dedicated to making every online transaction trusted, reliable and risk-free… buySAFE!
Next time, I hope these two innocent victims limit their purchases to buySAFE merchants. It will save them a whole lot of anguish and effort!
Watch this video. It is quite enlightening.
Related articles:
"Judge Judy Episode on eBay Trust & Safety" on Psychohistory blog
I recently asked Michael Beveridge, buySAFE’s Sr. Director of Business Intelligence, to share with us some of the interesting eCommerce data that buySAFE has developed over the last eighteen months. We consider data and analytics to be critical to buySAFE and our merchant customers’ businesses, and obviously, every merchant is interested in having solid, reliable data on the ROI associated with buySAFE. At the request of hundreds of our merchant customers, buySAFE has invested heavily into developing an amazing data and analytics platform that can deliver incredible insights beneficial to buySAFE Merchants. We will be sharing some of our new insights with you over the coming months, and I hope you enjoy the content. With that intro, here is Michael Beveridge’s first contribution to this blog…
At the PESA Summit this past week, there was a lot of talk about how to improve e-commerce conversion rates. I believe there are three critical drivers for conversion: product selection, price, and trust. Each of these issues would provide substantial content for an article, but I thought I would dedicate today’s post to a number of very important trust-related statistics.
If you have any doubt about the role of trust and buyer confidence in your e-commerce business success, please take a quick look at these stats.
- 55% of online shoppers say trustworthiness of the merchant is most important (vs. price, convenience, pleasure, other)
(Source: Online Shopper Research Report, 959 respondents, August 2006)
- 65% of online shoppers buy only from sites they know and trust
(Source: VeriSign Secured Seal Research Review 08/06)
- 72% of online shoppers are becoming more cautious when buying online
(Source: Gartner Research, 5000 respondents, May 2005 survey)
- 73% of online shoppers are concerned about the item being misrepresented (inaccurately described, counterfeit)
(Source: Online Shopper Research Report, 959 respondents, 08/06)
- 76% of online shoppers are worried about never getting their purchase
(Source: Online Shopper Research Report, 959 respondents, 08/06)
- 81% of online shoppers are concerned about merchant return/refund policies not being honored
(Source: Online Shopper Research Report, 959 respondents, 08/06)
- 84% of online shoppers are concerned about merchants not treating them fairly
(Source: Online Shopper Research Report, 959 respondents, 08/06)
- 85% of online shoppers are concerned about identity theft
(Source: TNS Research, 08/06)
- And, amazingly, over 50% of all U.S. internet users still don’t buy online (even from Amazon.com!).
(Source: Bear Stearns, September 2006)
With respect to this last statistic, "trust" issues are the primary
driver of e-commerce non-participation. Amazingly, more than 50% of
your potential customers will not buy online because they are nervous!
Are you kidding me? That is a huge number, and obviously, the time has
come for the e-commerce industry to take this issue seriously.