Because your product pages are where visitors make a clear ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ choice on whether or not they add the item to their cart….

….nailing your product pages is key.

No matter what it is you sell, these two ‘trust drivers’ will help persuade more of your visitors to decide ‘Yes’ on your product pages.

How to Inspire the Kind of Trust That Creates Customers

If someone hasn’t bought anything from you yet, then they don’t have any firsthand experience of being a customer of your company or using any of your products.

Which means that if they are going to buy from you, they have to take a small ‘leap of faith’ to make that first purchase.

They have to believe that your product will deliver the physical and/or emotional benefits they want to gain from buying it.

If they don’t, their chances of buying are slim.

The two main ‘questions of trust’ your potential customers are asking are:

• How reliable has this product been in delivering the results it promises to other people? Have others had a good experience?
• Does this company believe in & stand behind their products? How easy is it to return or exchange if it in fact is not what I believed it to be?

To boil those questions down to their essence, people want Reliability of Results and they want a Removal of Risk.

How to Demonstrate Reliability of Results on Your Shopify Product Pages

There are many ways to indicate the quality and reliability of your products, but there are a few that stand apart as the most powerful.

Unsurprisingly, testimonials + reviews from past customers are important…

….and the more you have, the better.

If you currently don’t have very many, that is okay too.

Start collecting more by including a ‘call to action’ for customers to leave a review. People are busy so you’ll want to make this ask at several different points.

Some ideas are to include this ‘call to action’ in the physical package they receive, in follow up emails after they’ve received their purchase, and in a personal ‘thank you’ note you send to them a couple weeks after their purchase.

While you’re collecting more reviews, be sure to feature a few strategically chosen reviews or testimonials.

You want these featured reviews to cover two things:

• The various types or demographics of buyers your product is forand
• The various objections and hesitations your potential buyers have

If people see other people like them who had similar fears & concerns as they have now getting the result they want through your product, they will move much closer to becoming a customer themselves.

Beyond the individuals who stepped up by giving your product(s) a review, you can also make use of other sources that give you credibility.

These include:

• Being featured in various media outlets
• Having some sort of celebrity endorsement
• Having various certifications or awards
• Having strength in numbers (i.e. “over 30,000 have bought and loved their widget from Widgets-R-Us!”)
• Having a social media feed showing people who have tagged your company or used your hashtag while showing off the product(s) in the post

Highlight the proof you currently have that shows your product is reliable in delivering results….

….and all the while, continue gathering more proof.

In addition to showing that your products can be relied on, you need to remove as much risk from the purchase as you are able.

How to Remove the Risk of Purchase your Customers Face On Product Pages

Even with tons of proof in the reliability of your product, there will still be some levels of skepticism amongst your potential customers.

The best way to help them move past any remaining doubt is to remove as much of the risk from their end of the transaction as possible.

The more willing you are to demonstrate how much your company believes in your products, the more trust you engender to your customers.

When you take more of the risk in the transaction, you firmly demonstrate your confidence in your products.

Let’s explore a few ways that you can accomplish this:

Guarantees & Warranties

The right guarantee(s) or warranty will depend on what exactly your product is and does.

The most basic form would be something like a “Money Back Satisfaction Guarantee” where the customer is offered a kind of blanket security where if they aren’t satisfied for any reason they can return the item and get their money back.

You can guarantee that the product will deliver certain results, solve a certain problem, or serve a certain function.

Or with a warranty you can say that the product will do the above for at least a certain length of time.

More powerful guarantees & warranties will be more effective.

Powerful in this sense meaning longer lengths of time, less restrictions + greater ease for the customer to invoke it, and a greater promise of what the product will do for them.

It will be up to you to find the right mix between providing powerful reassurances to your potential customers while stating things that your products + your company are capable of standing behind.

[Note: it is a bit counterintuitive but in most cases, the longer period of time you offer a guarantee or warranty the less likely a customer is to invoke it and ask to return your product]

Depending on the nature of your products, you may need to use a little creativity.

Brainstorm at least 5 different guarantees or warranties you can offer on your products and then interview a handful of existing customers to ask them which ones are the most appealing to them.

Returns, Exchanges, and Shipping

John Carlton is one of the all-time copywriting greats. His chief professional function is to write words that motivate people to buy things, and he had this to say about your potential customers:

“Imagine them as drowsy, recently overfed sloths who were just laid down onto an incredibly comfortable couch.”

These are the creatures you must be able to motivate to buy your products. You have to imagine they are coming in to your site with absolutely no motivation to take a buying action….

….so to be able to achieve that feat, you need to be able to increase their desire for your product while also making it as easy to buy from you as possible.

We’re focusing on that second part here. We want to remove the barriers and obstacles (both physical & psychological) your potential customers face when considering buying from you.

These “sloths” truly loathe being inconvenienced in any way. We want to assure them not only is their “purchase risk” being relieved…

….we also want to minimizing their investment of time, energy, logistics, etc when potentially having to return or exchange the product.

By making it free and easy for them to modify or undo anything after they’ve made their purchase, you can help alleviate a lot of the ‘fear of the unknown’ that comes with buying online (AKA buying a product “sight unseen”).

Since we can’t exactly recreate the experience of buying something at a ‘brick-and-mortar’ store that you can physically examine before buying, providing these types of reassurances are the best we can do (until new technology emerges).

Make It Easy For Anyone To Contact You

If you’ve ever once had a bad experience trying to get in touch with a company that does not care much about supporting their customers, you know how much it sucks.

Even one experience like that can leave such a bad taste in the mouth that people (often subconsciously) choose not to deal with a company if they even remotely feel like they could be treated that way again….

….and even if your company does make it easy for customers to get in touch with you, it may not be immediately obvious to prospective customers.

Being clear about how you can be reached and what they can expect in terms of response time can create more trust between you and your potential customers.

When people see that you are openly willing to provide care and support to non-customers, they can easily imagine receiving as good (if not better) support once they are paid customers of your company.

We want to create a consistent experience for the customer where it is easy to get in contact with you at any point in their purchase path….

…so whether they are currently considering buying, waiting for their purchase to arrive, or have been a loyal customer for a long time….

….they believe they can get any questions answered and any problems resolved.

Where to Add These ‘Trust Drivers” on Your Product Page

Your visitors are going to see your site differently than you do.

While the same text, images, and other page elements are going to show up the same for them as they do for you….

….your visitors are seeing your site for the first time (or have only seen it a couple of times) as opposed to how often you look at your own Shopify store.

While you may be very aware of your various policies regarding guarantees or warranties or shipping / exchanges / returns or how to contact your company…..

….most of your visitors are not.

Even if you state these things clearly on your home page or they have their own dedicated page that explicitly share these details, a significant percentage of your visitors will skip or gloss right over a lot of the text on your site.

Truly it is difficult to “overdo it” when it comes to letting your customers know about the ways that you remove their risks & demonstrate your products’ reliability.

Your visitors will appreciate knowing and being reminded of all the ways your company tries to accommodate and serve them as customers.

(not to mention there is a lot of power in restating & reinforcing key benefits several times throughout the process of making a purchase)

There is likely room to have this sort of information on your home page, on your product pages, and on your cart page too.

On product pages, it is important to have these elements show up in the places where visitors look at the most.

If you use a heatmap software like Crazyegg or Hotjar or similar, you know exactly where visitors give the most attention to. If not, you can generally assume the areas above the fold and close to the ‘Add to Cart’ button receive a lot of attention.

If you can’t think of good places to add these elements, consider using something like a ‘Hellobar’:

….or a ‘sticky’ element in the corner of the page:

….or utilize the space under or around the ‘Add to Cart’ button:

Business Moves At The Speed of Trust

The more someone trusts your company, the faster & more likely they will be to make a purchase.

If a customer doesn’t see the things they need to trust you directly on your Shopify site, then they’re going to leave your site….

….and while they may leave to look for 3^rd party reviews of your products and/or to ask their social networks if anyone they know has experience buying from you….

…once they’re off your site, the odds of them buying plummet.

There are too many distractions available on the internet and in our lives that can permanently pull them away from their potential purchase once they exit your site.

By showing on site the ways your product is reliable and how your company removes their risk, you can inspire the trust your visitors need to have in order to make a confident buying decision.

Using This Beyond Your Shopify Product Pages….

The two “trust drivers” we discussed at length in this article are key in any sale or persuasion attempt. Whether you’re hoping to get a family member to try something new or get another company to agree to a promotional partnership….

….making it easier, lower risk, and higher potential for reward for them is going to improve your odds of the outcome you desire.

We do the same for our clients by showcasing winning tests we’ve run, the positive impact they’ve had on revenue, and testimonials of clients describing the results earned through our work together.

While not as powerful ‘proof’ as the above, we also highlight various ‘Shopify Store Teardowns’ and feature our bestselling book Profit Hacking.

In addition to doing our best to prove the reliability of our results, we also remove any risk through our ROI guarantee:

We guarantee that the revenue gains you earn through the tests we run will more than pay for the cost of our services within 90 days of us working together.

And because conversion increases through winning A/B tests stick long term, the ROI you earn on this investment will continue to grow.

If you are interested in an introductory discussion to see if working together can bring you great (and guaranteed!) results, please take 20 seconds to fill out this 3 question Google Form & we will be in touch within 2 business days.