You'll learn:
- How important trust is, and how you can increase trust using third-party payment
- How 3rd party payment options affect conversions
- Why it is important to eliminate friction from the buying experience
- How to use personalization to reduce buying friction
- Why you need to get your message across without hitting the customer over the head with it
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Transcript
Miz Trujillo 0:01
Hello everyone, we are back recording the very first episode of the year, episode six of Make Merchants Money. I hope you enjoyed your holiday season and had a great new year. We are kicking off 2019 with a very special episode where we will be discussing how we can use trust drivers to encourage conversion. Gaining the trust of visitors to our site can be the defining factor on whether that crucial conversion will take place or not, so to help us with this important conversation we have two wonderful guests. Joining us back on the show again is owner of Underwaterpistol, Gary. Thanks for joining us, Gary, how are you?
Gary Carruthers 0:36
Very well. Happy New Year.
Miz Trujillo 0:38
Excellent, Happy New Year to you too and it's an absolute pleasure to welcome David Smallwood on the show, director of partnerships and marketplaces in the UK for PayPal, a company that really needs very little introduction. Thanks so much for joining us today David, how are you?
David Smallwood 0:53
Good, thank you and thank you very much for having me on the show.
Miz Trujillo 0:57
It's an absolute pleasure. So for a company like PayPal trust is really a defining factor. It's what makes it a household name for many people around the world. And this really makes sense, especially when you consider people are trusting you their money, but translating this over to ecommerce stores, how important is it really for them to be viewed as trustworthy? And what role does offering trustworthy payment options like PayPal play in this?
David Smallwood 1:24
Paypal has literally grown up with the premise that trust is probably the most important thing that we can give our consumers and our merchants and really the way that we work with our merchants, to give them that is continually showing consumers that they can trust the retailer that they're buying from. And also working with retailers to show that and to ensure that they can show up trusted payment methods in convenient ways, anywhere in the world really. And so it's also about spreading your wings geographically, it's not just about doing it in one market. To build trust in different countries around the world you have to invest. PayPal has done a lot of that for the merchants that use our services.
Miz Trujillo 2:13
Absolutely, yeah, offering trustworthy payment options like PayPal, how, how is it likely to affect conversion rates?
David Smallwood 2:52
Having a trustworthy payment solution, like Paypal in place on a site drives a significant increase in conversion for the merchants that offer it to their consumers. And it depends, is the answer. It's not a one size fits all. And it really, really does depend on a number of things. The first would be the geography and where,the retailer is trying to sell, which countries, what markets, what currencies, the average transaction size, how considered the purchases is. And so if you're thinking of a larger transaction,or larger purchase trust is even more important than on the lower end. And on the lower end, convenience is more important than trust. And so it's really around what's right for the merchant. And we spent a lot of time trying to get and to work in the industry to get and examples of how trust drives conversion. And the position that we've taken more recently is that we've gone away from giving out generalized stats and we've gone more towards working with merchants and system integrators and developers to actually get specific with our merchants and partners. We do that through optimization initiatives in hand with the systems integrators and merchants. We're actually right in the middle of a pretty big one that we're doing with Magenta today and that's been running for about three months, you can see the results on www.mobileoptimized.org and there's some really interesting stuff there, right. So one of the things that jumps out at us is literally just by changing the button on the checkout, and changing that button away from a from a shopping cart, or a trolley image to an image of a padlock, that's trust, right? Moving people away from just the shopping cart over to a padlock, we've seen retailers going through these experiments get a 7.7% increase in revenue per visitor just from doing that. And so that's the power of and belief of trust, or the subconscious belief that trust exists on that side, literally you just need to change imagery a little and you'll get increase. Now that that is increased even more so when you put trusted payment brands in place, you know, like Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, American Express, etc. They're globally recognized brands that will help drive conversions for different reasons. Something else that we've done within the mobile optimization piece of work is an interesting one that that's jumped out at us. This isn't specifically about trust, it's about ease and convenience and really, one thing that we've quite surprised by is, one of the experiments is that you auto fill the zip or postcode code in through checkout based on GEO location and it gives a 3% increase on desktop on RPV, but actually a negative 2 on tablet and mobile. So yeah, it's really interesting, we're not sure why and that's part of the fun of this, the www.mobileoptimized.org initiative is really, we're uncovering stuff that's really specific to merchants at a merchant by merchant level and really uncovering stuff that we had no idea about as systems integrators or retailers, or as PayPal. Really interesting stuff there. We've got about 12 systems integrators on that today and about 50 merchants. We've done about 250 different experiments through that initiative, it's open to any S.I. working on Magento and through 2019 we're going to be opening it up to other platforms to so it's not just about Magento, it will be on all the ecom platforms that PayPal runs and works on, but this initiative isn't led by PayPal, we're response rating it but it's really it led by systems integrators and developers, designers and retailers looking at what works for retailers specifically and, and it's fully sponsored by PayPal, so there's no real cost to to get onto this mobile optimization piece of work if, if anyone was interested.
Gary Carruthers 7:30
And Dave, with regards to offering a variety of payment options at checkout, and specifically recognisable options, is there a sweet spot about how many options there should be, are you aware of any research about that?
David Smallwood 7:45
This is a really good question that I keep getting asked by partners and merchants the whole time, the answer, sorry, is that it depends, it really depends on the merchant, and the real estate spaces is really, really valuable in check out right? And just generally on anyone's site. And having a whole plethora of buttons available, may help, sometimes it actually hurts. So really, what merchants really need to do is focus in on what works in the market and in the, in the segment and in the demographic that they're aiming for and really get it right, rather than just throwing everything at at the fence and seeing what sticks. We've seen a lot of merchants on board with new other alternative payment methods, because they come with great names, or trusted brands and good marketing campaigns etc. and then see very, very little conversion through those payment methods. However, the question remains, would they have still got that sale if that payment method hadn't been there? And no one knows the answer, right? It's almost impossible to actually say yes or no to that question. So, you know, I would do it, see what works and, you know do some optimization tests and check what actually works through AB testing. And that's one of the things about the www.mobileoptimized.org, and it is the experiments are self optimizing so whatever really works through the experimentation stays alive and that drives an increase on the site. Something else to mention in that is PayPal over the last six months has been deploying a solution called Smart Buttons or Payment Smart Buttons in across our ecom and technology platform partners and these buttons are really smart, as much as they know where the consumer is and what the consumer might want to use. So rather than the merchant having to work out or the retail having to work out, okay, for this country, for this person, for this market, we're gonna have to implement this payment method, you can integrate Payment PayPal Smart Button solution, and enable that dynamic switching based on where the consumer is and what the consumer might want to use, which is smart, it does what it says on the tin. We've seen really good success on that in the US specifically with Venmo, which is a really US centric person to person payment method that is part of the PayPal family, but as well as with PayPal credit, and a couple of other payment solutions in 2019. And we've talked about this globally already but in 2019, we will be rolling out with other alternative payment methods within that same capability. So you'll be able to get safer within Europe within this integration and a bunch of open banking connectors as well. So really opening up the options, but tailored down to the consumer, rather than the merchants, so that's really what's going to make a difference is giving consumers stuff that they recognize and want to use.
Miz Trujillo 11:21
No, that's great. You've touched on so many points that I wanted to cover in the conversation and we'll hopefully touch on again, including the design and also optimizing for mobile. Something that I've noticed is to consider the checkout experience as a whole on top of the payment options in order to build trust from start to finish. I'm sure you've both had similar situations but I went to book a flight the other day and after putting all my card details in and getting verification from the bank pop up that had come up, the airline's mobile app decided to freeze up, do nothing, leave us in limbo as the whether the payment went through, the flights were booked, anything. Now situations like this make consumers quite nervous, can cause them to go elsewhere, so how important is checkout optimization when it comes to conversions, what should listeners be doing to guarantee there check out process is working flawlessly?
Gary Carruthers 12:25
I mean, we've used the word already, but it's just about reducing friction. So we want to give people no reason at all to get concerned about the process. So we get them through it nice and quickly. And that can be a whole variety of things, but one thing that's really important is that you're capturing only the minimal amount of information, so, you're not asking for exhaustive sort of bits of information. And anything that might sort of flag concern, you justify that by explaining why you're capturing that information. For example, the phone number, you know, explaining that it could be for people to be contacted you if the shipping related questions for example. And another thing is about displaying local currency, that can really help and conversely can scare people off if they see a checkout in another currency.
Miz Trujillo 13:24
And David anything you'd add?
David Smallwood 13:24
Yeah this is something that is very close and dear to my heart and we do a lot of this type of analysis with merchants and retailers all over the world, one of the stats that jumps out is, when you're asking consumers to pay online, on mobile, on tablet, with a credit card, where you're asking them to tap those details in, and then fill in their address details, and then, you know, sign up and become a customer. On average, you're asking for customers to do about 150 clicks and taps through the checkout. Every one of those clicks or taps has the potential to create churn or conversion drop off. So if you can take it down to 2,3,4, whatever it is, you're going to be increasing conversion straight away and driving an increase in revenue for the business and that that's doing it. And I love this stat and it's really something that comes out quite a lot, it's not actually a stat, it's a statement that quite a lot of people come to me and they're like, the main reason I use PayPal is because I left my wallet upstairs and I don't want to walk up there and get it, I just want to be able to click quickly and check out. And that's really, you know, one of the one of the main drivers behind PayPal over the years, is really how do we make life simpler for both our merchants and our consumers by cutting out the friction, removing the information that they need to fill in, because once they've done it once with us, they've loaded that information into their wallet in the cloud, that can be pulled back into the account sign-up form that a retailer might be asking you to fill in, delivery form that you're asking the consumer to fill in, so really cutting out information input right back to almost nothing. And we released a feature a year and a half ago, two years ago, called Paypal One Touch, which allows consumers to save the fact that they use their Paypal account on this device and that will allow them to check out with literally one touch moving forward on a website that accepts Paypal. And that's been a hugely adopted solution, more than 100 million people around the world using it frequently.
Miz Trujillo 16:07
Amazing, amazing, everything we're touching on leads perfectly on to the next point I wanted to go into, again, reducing friction, this time in the form of personalisation, even in the case of the example I gave before when I was trying to book the flight, I've had other companies before send me a personalised email when they airline had seen I'd not finished the purchase and that would have both built trust and in that particular case, guaranteed a conversion right then and there. What are other examples of how personalisation can be used to increase trust and maximize conversions? Gary, maybe you could start us off?
Gary Carruthers 16:46
Yeah, I think there are a few obvious things regards personalisation, like live chat, there's an obvious one, where you can really dive in and, you know, convince somebody of the veracity of what you're trying to sell and lay any concerns. We like to recommend tagging and segmenting based on users behavior on the site. So you can do some messaging accordingly and that's a really powerful thing that ties in with building your mailing list and leveraging email automation as well. So we really want to encourage people to sign up and incentivize them to sign up so we can have communications that are relevant and enticing for them based on their likes and dislikes etc. Push notifications and apps like PushOwl can be really powerful as well when regards with personalisation. These are some of the things we'd often discuss with merchants.
Miz Trujillo 17:54
Perfect, yeah that's great, we had a great conversation with PushOwl on the podcast not long ago which our listeners should definitely check out if they get the chance. David anything you'd add in this regard?
David Smallwood 17:54
Yeah it's definitely something we've been focussing on over the last couple of years really, and really to address small business concerns around the fact that they don't have the resources, or the ability, or the time to really focus in on cart recovery and all that sort of stuff, on top of trying to get their business to work. So we've done a lot in that space over the last couple of years, and one of the things we did more recently is we made a strategic investment in a company called Cloud IQ, which does cart recovery and we've integrated that into the PayPal infrastructure. So they're actually the only cart recovery solution on the market today that will allow you to see the checkout journey all the way through, including the Paypal payment, so when a consumer goes to pay with a Paypal account, they sometimes can be redirected over to PayPal and then go through the PayPal Checkout, then come back to the merchant site. That's one journey. Another journey is a pop-up will arrive on the on the merchant side, or the retailer site and if that consumer has ticked that they want to use one touch they check out and they don't have to go through the journey, but Cloud IQ gives us that tracking and through the PayPal journey as well and that's quite unique. We then integrated that into the PayPal environment even further by allowing and working with merchants and partners to really enable the merchant to be able to see how many PayPal customers actually came to this site in the last seven days, 30 days, 90 days. So you can really get personalised around the fact that they are a Paypal customer and it could be you really useful to position 'Hey, we know you use PayPal and you can check out in a couple of clicks', as one of the messages that that a retailer good position to their consumers just but by knowing that there are PayPal customer up front, as opposed to in the checkout. And we've launched that solution that it's called Paypal Marketing Solutions and we've seen really good traction and good results on that. And it's really simple things like on the homepage, positioning a message about the fact that the consumer uses Paypal or likes PayPal or that they could get an offer if they paid with PayPal, drives significant results and we're seeing really good traction there.
Miz Trujillo 20:54
There's nothing like being able to have an experience that gets better and better as you use it and to be gathering more date and this is both as a seller having good ecommerce tools, but also someone who uses the store, when you find a store that your experience gets better each time you visit, it feels great and is obviously going to increase conversions. Something I wanted to touch on and maybe David, you can help us with this, is shipping, how we can build trust through the shipping options we provide, but also should we always be including free shipping? Will this help increase conversion rates?
David Smallwood 21:31
Yes, yes and yes, shipping is a really important driver for conversion for retailers and you don't have to look far to any big retailers or big ecom players to see that's one of the main drivers, one of the main things they push on is that. In order to be able to compete in today's ecom landscape retailers need to really think carefully about this and make it an option for consumer to be able to do free shipping, but also free returns. Free returns is actually a very strong driver and we're involved in a number of programs, partners and merchants around the world that help drive free shipping if you use your PayPal account to make a payment and we'd be happy to talk to anyone about any of that as well. We're seeing just the fact that it's there, you know, that you're offering the ability to do free returns drive, you know, double digit increases in conversion on the sites that were and we're able to pinpoint that double digit growth down to this specific initiative as opposed to, you know, a combination of things across the time shipping and using the optimization work and the AB testing we're doing, we can really pinpoint the value of each of these initiatives, quite accurately and we're happy to do that at a merchant by merchant level rather than trying to get everyone to do a one size fits all, we really do believe in that, you know, let's work it out for you. Let's work it out for your site and see how what we need to do to make your site successful.
Miz Trujillo 22:35
Amazing, Gary, anything you'd like to add on the shipping?
Gary Carruthers 23:22
Yeah, just that we always, always recommend very strongly the free shipping angle, some merchants are really really reluctant to do it because they see it as really eating into their bottom line, but for me, it's a false economy not to do it, it just makes sense and it should just be built into the running costs of the business. Bearing in mind that if you're not bricks and mortar, if you're ecommerce only, there should be a bit of headroom anyway to absorb this and; if not, make space for it. Because the conversion rate of return is going to pay for itself. So yeah, we would strongly recommend it. I mean, you don't have to do sort of blanket either, you know, it can be over a specific amount, or buying two more items, that sort of thing. So that can make it a bit more palatable for some merchants who are reluctant to do it. And, again, test, you know, just test it out and see if it pays dividends. We're always convinced that it will. And yeah, usually, we don't have any instances where merchants decide after trying it out that they get rid of free shipping, you know, they usually buy into it once they test it.
Miz Trujillo 24:50
Perfect, talking about people being reluctant to do things, it'd be good to focus on designing copy for a bit. Something that I tend to see fairly frequently is people who are extremely reluctant to update the look and copy of sites, and not just reluctant, but also completely unaware of the impact this could be having on conversion. And I always try and relate it back to what a physical shop looks like, if it looks dingy and old, from the outside, are you really going to want to go in? And if you haven't updated the store in years how much do they care about the product? So are there any tips you might have for our listeners when it comes to building trust, through design and copy? Gary maybe?
Gary Carruthers 25:35
Yeah, well, I mean, you've sort of hit the nail on the head, really, you wouldn't, you wouldn't want to be visiting bricks & mortar, if it looks unloved and likewise, yeah, I think what we try and do is we try and build it as sort of a rhythm to the calendar year, where there's certain busier parts of the year, like a Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Monday, Christmas and so on, various other parts of the year that we use that as an opportunity to do a bit of a spring clean an update on it could be just the banners, or sort of the color palette or could be, you know, all over sort of reworking of the look and feel of the site. And I think that people don't want to keep on coming back to the same old, same old really, you know, they need to have a bit of interest. And that also ties in with your your email marketing as well, obviously, if you're drawing people back, and there's something new to look at. And I think not only designed but I think that tone of voice of the content is really important, I think if the content jars with the audience that it aims that, that's a problem, so you need to be mindful of that. Really clear partner logos, render logos, payment provider logos, that sort of thing visually really bolsters the idea that it's a reputable company you're dealing with and that should help with conversion certainly.
Miz Trujillo 26:36
Absolutely, David, from your side on the design and copy front?
David Smallwood 26:38
Just literally echoing everything that has just been said, but that payment piece and putting those logos above the fold and making them visible as people land on the homepage is vital for peoples conversion and trust to be built on from that first moment. You have a very limited window of opportunity to really get that trust message across in a strong way and there's a lot of brand value in all of those payment marks that are out there that can really help merchants to that very quickly.
Miz Trujillo 27:54
Perfect, yeah, we've we've touched on on the tone of voice, but it'd be great to elaborate a bit further specifically when it comes to calls to action. The line between effective and pushy, or overly intrusive, can be pretty thin and can definitely affect how people trust a site. What pitfalls should store owners be aware of, what guidelines would you recommend they follow? Gary maybe?
Gary Carruthers 28:21
Yeah, like you say, it is a fine line, I think we try and recommend that people shouldn't be afraid to sell so don't be worried, you know, to be a shrinking violet, if you get an important message or a great product, don't be shy about it. That said, you don't want to be hitting people over the head and being too pushy. But I think clear calls to action and it goes without saying, if people are on a page and they don't know what to do, then you've lost them. So just really clear calls to action so people know what they're meant be doing and don't make people guess. That's really the answer for everything, keep it simple, don't make them guess. And again heat mapping can really help demystify how to tackle that, seeing what people are doing on the site when their browsing, get some data from the likes of HotJar and make sure the important calls to action especially on the prime pages are above the fold so people don't have to look around looking for the CTA's.
Miz Trujillo 29:02
Definitely, David, anything you'd say on this?
David Smallwood 29:03
The only thing that I'd like to add to this, is if you look at the evolution of the checkout itself you can see that it started out with you've got to fill in all your details, get to a place where you're ready to make a payment and then make a payment and then these shortcut options have arrived and they allow you to click a button at the check out or the basket and what we're seeing really work a lot today is actually a pay now product. So bring that message of being able to checkout and do what you want to do on the site right up to the product. So putting a payment button there drives conversion as well. But you've got to think about the dynamic of which products to put that button on that are normally just single items that people would buy on their own ,versus applying that pay now button on a product page, you know, blindly across the site, it's really got to be done where know that product is normally just sold by itself, because we don't want to reduce basket size by doing that. Yeah, that's the main main thing that I would pushed to or get people to think about is how do you make it easier for your customers to get out of there as fast as possible.
Miz Trujillo 31:12
Excellent. Another topic I was hoping to get your expertise on is the importance of reviews and testimonials. I know it's personally the first place I look before I purchase and according to some stats I was reading up on recently, I'm not the only one. 90% of respondents claimed that positive online reviews influence buying decisions, 85% of consumers said that they read up to 10 reviews before feeling they can trust a business and the one that's the most important for this conversation. 50 or more reviews per product can mean a 4.6% increase in conversion rates. So when we look at stats like that, what would you say to ecommerce stores who have maybe overlooked this aspect? And what tips would you give when it comes to collecting reviews and keeping them as updated as possible? Gary maybe?
Gary Carruthers 32:10
Oh, gosh, this is so important and some of the reasons why merchants decide not to have reviews on their site, because it looks ugly or whatever, it just makes me slightly lose my mind. I think there's so many good solutions as well out there that you can plug in very, very easily into your your site and it just adds weight to your argument. People like to sort of have a nosey at what other people are saying about it, you know. We also try and sort of argue, you know, there's so many different pieces of the puzzle that are going to result in a sale or your competitor making the sale and you've just got to leverage as many of these different things as possible. And reviews are a really, really powerful part of that. So yeah, there has to be really, really good reason for somebody not to want to use one of these, I haven't been convinced of any argument yet, so yeah, I'm all for them. If their there just for making up the numbers, their sort of meaningless and the actual comments aren't useful, that's a problem obviously, but I suppose there are some solutions where you have a degree of editorial control over that and it doesn't automatically publish absolutely everything, so I think it's just about selecting the right tool for the job.
Miz Trujillo 34:23
If we're looking a bit at how users can start collecting reviews effectively maybe someone who wants to start, any tips on that either of you?
Gary Carruthers 34:38
Yeah, I think just for the first part of the process go to sites that you shop from regularly yourself and understand what is good about the reviews displayed. I mean I'm the same leading up to Christmas you know I was doing plenty of shopping and I was gravitating more and more to to the review section of the pages to just suss out, get a good feel and just what you're doing, you're scanning, so you're scanning for one the amount of reviews, secondly the amount of positive reviews, you know the sort of five stars versus the one star and so on. Especially on the likes of Amazon you can really scoot around quickly and build up a really sort of quite sophisticated process of elimination with these. So find out what you think the sites that you're using are doing well and then you'll be able to easily find which solution they're using. For the most part then you go and review that app or that solution and find out a bit more about how customisable it is. Because a lot of people don't like the look of these solutions, but a lot of them are very customisable and we can make them look sympathetic to rest of the sites look and feel. So yeah that would be my process.
David Smallwood 36:12
The only other thing that I've heard other people talk about and that I also believe in is, when you do implement reviews on your site don't only make them positive, you do need to keep them balanced, because if it's totally positive it rings a different tone and that probably creates a feeling of distrust.
Miz Trujillo 36:38
That's so true.
Gary Carruthers 36:41
100% agree, we've been victims of sort of vindictive reviews, well one in particular and I think you've got to be wary of that occurring and have a strategy for that. Obviously dive in, negative reviews can be really beneficial because it can give you an opportunity to display your level of customer service and engagement with your customers, so it's a bit of a double edged sword, but sometimes, on occasion you get people who just want to stick the boot in, keyboard warriors that just want to be vindictive about something, so I suppose that you just need to be wary of that. But yeah like Dave just mentioned, it can be an opportunity negative reviews as well.
Miz Trujillo 37:37
It's so true we've been staying at a lot of Airbnb's recently and there's been a few times where we see some with 100% positive reviews and something just feels off about them sometimes. And when you do have negative reviews, at least you can see how the owner responds to it, what exactly the issue was, if it bothers you or not, you can learn a lot from them. A little extra tips that I thought our listeners might find useful, a stat that I found, more than 50% of respondents are likely to give a referral or leave a review if offered a direct incentive, social recognition or access to an exclusive loyalty program so that could come in handy if trying to start getting the reviews coming through as well.
Gary Carruthers 38:24
Yeah absolutely and something like Yotpo as well bundles lots of additional functionality in with their review solutions. So yeah that can work really well and ties in with social media channels etc.
Miz Trujillo 38:41
Perfect, I guess we've come to the most obvious topic that we really need to cover if we're talking about trust in the confines of the internet and that is security and fraud. Especially whenever money and data come into play it becomes a very important conversation. So how do store owners go about preventing fraud, keeping their sites secure and the customers data safe? David maybe?
David Smallwood 39:12
Sure, this is a big question for everyone and you don't have to look very far back in the headlines to see examples of really big retailers getting this wrong right? It's a very, very hard thing to get perfectly right and the only thing that I would really recommend is working with partners and business suppliers to do it for you rather than to try and do it yourself, because it's a huge mammoth task to get it right. In terms of what we do and how we work at Paypal, again we've grown up over the years really focusing in on security and trust and building that loyalty through those two drivers there. And convenience obviously. And then one of the ways that we've done that is we built really strong buyer and seller protection policies which sit across our platform. Historically, because we grew up in the world of eBay where goods were sent in a box from A to B and and we had to work out how to make sure that A they got there and B if they got there broken we could do something about and you know, our policies helped both the buyer and the seller. And that sits on top and above anything that the card schemes do with seller protection, 3d secure, verified by visa stuff like that, this is a level of protection above that so it's really unique. And we protect for fraud as well, but it's for things like items not as described. So someone sent you a red shirt when you brought bought a blue one, you know, who takes liability, who handles that? How do we work that through the system so that everyone gets to a happy outcome. And we've got really, really good at doing that, for retailers and the consumers. And we extended those policies beyond physical goods, so we do that for airline tickets now as well and downloads too. And it's really, really important for merchants to be able to be comfortable that they're protected and they're not opening a fraud gate and by selling something or doing something online and also for consumers to feel the same on the other side that they're not going to be left out hanging when something goes wrong.
Miz Trujillo 41:37
Absolutely, absolutely. Gary, anything you'd add on the safety and fraud prevention side of things?
Gary Carruthers 41:45
Yeah, I suppose the thing I would mention is whichever platform you choose make sure it's PCI compliant, that's a start and the other thing I would say is if you've got any concerns or you need information contact your payment gateway, contact the support of the ecommerce platform and just find out as much as you need to. Don't leave it to guesswork and don't expose yourself to risk, because you just don't need the stress. Let the gateway and ecommerce platforms do the heavy lifting for you, you should choose the right solutions and then trust in them to manage things for you.
Miz Trujillo 42:12
Yeah it's not really something you want to go messing around with and getting wrong is it? It's something best left to people who know what they're doing.
Gary Carruthers 42:12
Exactly.
David Smallwood 42:12
Just to further that point, the European regulators have implemented PSD-2 over the last sort of 12 months. Or 2-3 years but went live about 12 months ago. And in September this year there's going to be a new level of customer authentication that will be mandatory around Europe, which will basically mean security will get better, and that's really why the regulators have started to implement this. But it will also mean that merchants and retailers have to do more, or payment gateways and providers have to do it for merchants probably more accurately put. So there's going to be an extra level of authentication that's going to be a requirement for September and your payment gateways should be talking to you about it now probably.
Miz Trujillo 42:53
There's me frantically taking notes because I'm sure that will be an excellent topic for another podcast too when that starts coming up. Before we start wrapping things up, are there any other main trust drives you feel we should be adding into the conversation? David?
David Smallwood 43:24
I think social, you know integrating social into your messaging or integrating social and the way that you handle social, back to Gary's point earlier is you know it's a real opportunity to show how you handle something going wrong. Social is a feedback mechanism and you should be looking and working on that carefully to make your your consumers will see you will respond and you're trustworthy as a retailer.
Miz Trujillo 44:37
Absolutely and the personality that comes through with that says so much about about the brand and can help it build trust so quickly as well, it's such an important side of things. Gary anything that that you'd add?
Gary Carruthers 44:52
Yeah two final thoughts. First one, free samples or free trials for your product or solution I think is a great way of building trust and it's a no brainer and everybody loves free stuff and shows as a merchant that you're really confident in what you're selling so yeah I think that's a no brainer. And then on a more fundamental level your product itself, is it good enough for somebody to buy? Your product or solution if it's a load of old tat then no matter what trust you're trying to build in other ways, people aren't going to trust you because you're not selling something good. So sell something you believe in and you're happy putting your name to, it sounds a bit obvious, but I think it's important.
Miz Trujillo 45:49
If we had to leave our listeners with one thought, something that we've maybe already talked about but we want to leave in their minds to go away with, David what would you leave them with?
David Smallwood 46:01
Come and do some experiments on www.mobileoptimize.org, reach out to the team at Paypal and work with us to get merchants or retailers through those experiments to work out what best class looks like for them, as opposed to what best class in general is across a business or across a segment, because what might be best class for someone might be worst class for someone else. Come work with us and we'll see what are the exact answers for your site.
Miz Trujillo 46:37
it sounds really exciting and we will put all the links in the description to that below as well. And Gary if you had to leave our listeners with something to go away with?
Gary Carruthers 46:49
Yeah I mean something that's so important and key to an ecommerce business running healthfully and being successful, just don't try to do it all yourself. Go to your payment gateway or go to your ecommerce platform or to a professional in the digital realm and get get advice, do lots of reading yourself by all means but get good advice. And if you put all these various component parts together your site will be healthy and it'll convert.
Miz Trujillo 47:26
Thank you so much Gary. Thank you to the both of you for being on the show today, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you both.
Gary Carruthers 47:35
Thanks very much.
David Smallwood 47:36
And to you, thank you very much, have a great weekend.
Miz Trujillo 47:40
And you, and a huge thank you to all our listeners to. You can find links to both Paypal and Underwaterpistol in the description below, as well as to any reports we've mentioned. And if you are a new listener, make sure to check out the previous episodes to because there's some absolute gems in there. Thanks for listening. And thanks again, David and Gary.
