KikReport: Helps Businesses Demonstrate Trust to Shoppers

Are you losing sales because shoppers do not know enough about your business? It is human nature that when shopping online customers look for indications and information that they can trust the online business that they are about to buy from. More and more shoppers decide that if an online merchant does not have indications of trustworthiness, they will not buy from a business. That is the reason it is so important for online merchants to quickly and in a powerful manner demonstrate trustworthiness and security to shoppers. If merchants fail to do this, they will lose the chance to close a sale.

Shoppers Concerns When Shopping Online

When shoppers look at an online store that they want to buy from, they often want to know more about the following:

1) Who is the management for this business?
2) Where is the business located?
3) What kind of return and customer service policies does the merchant have?
4) Does the business store credit card and other sensitive information securely?
5) Does this business have a track record of delivering a product?
6) What have other customers thought about shopping with this merchant?

Use a KikReport to Answer Shoppers Questions Regarding Trust

Merchants can use a KikReport to help answer each of these questions.  By answering each of these questions, a merchant has a much better chance of getting a customer to understand that the merchant’s business is trustworthy.  The KikReport acts as a merchant report card that provides dynamic and real time information that is organized in an easy format for shoppers to understand.  Each KikReport contains detailed information such as:

1) Details regarding the management for a business;

2) Information regarding website security and website traffic for your business;

3) Key pieces of information about your return, privacy and customer service policies;

4) Recent comments from other shoppers and customers of yours;

5) Information on where your business is located; and

6) An optional video that you can use to introduce yourself to shoppers

The KikReport allows you to display this information to shoppers.  Using the KikReport and your KikScore is a powerful way to demonstrate trust to online shoppers.  By using these tools to demonstrate trust you can get more shoppers to buy from you. To see a sample KikReport, click here.  This is the KikReport for the Interactive Security Group.

More information, means more trust which translates into more sales for your business.  Find out more information about KikScore and KikReport here.

Please let us know if you have any feedback on the KikReport.  We would love to hear from your.

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Startup Checklist for Small Businesses

As we know, most business start out small. Starting a business is a very busy time in an entrepreneur’s life. So busy that many critical steps are often overlooked. In an effort to help those small, but soon to be large, businesses identify critical areas for success, we have put together a short 10 step checklist to make sure you are covering all of your bases.

Top 10 Checklist:

1. Research the Product or Service You Seek To Sale.
2. Create a Business Plan.
3. Determine Your Capital Budget.
4. Choose and Register Your Business Name.
5. Decide on the Legal Form of Your Business.
6. Open a Company Checking Account.
7. Determine if you need any state or local licenses/permits.
8. Obtain a Federal Employer Identification Number.
9. Set up a business website and business email address.
10. Research various trust products in the marketplace to help you fast track your credibility with your potential customers.

As you may know, there are many more factors that determines a small businesses success; however, if you were to ask me what are the top 10, then you the ones above are it.

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Algorithms — They're Not Just For Big Businesses Anymore

Thanks to the internet, online buyers and sellers have access to a lot of data to help guide their buying and selling decisions.  Finding the average price of a 1984 Chevy Citation (my first car) is a couple of clicks away.  But the problem with data is that it is everywhere and nowhere at the same time.  As I mentioned in a previous post, online reviews often suffer from grade inflation, and determining a reliable trend really requires thousands of transactions — not really possible for individual buyers and sellers.  So though it is easier than ever to gather information, that has just resulted in information overload.  This isn’t really a unique problem.  Big businesses have faced this issue for quite some time.  What’s their answer?  Scoring models with sophisticated algorithms.  Or stated more simply, math.

Though our interest in math prevented us from being very popular in high school, it has allowed us to create complex risk models for many types of decisions that big businesses face.  So why not use our nerdy interests to help small businesses sell online and provide comfort to shoppers that would like to buy from a small business, but isn’t sure of the shopping experience he/she will face?  That’s exactly what we did.  I can’t get into the details of the scoring m0del, or others (much like the popular kids in highschool) will just steal our homework.  But in general terms, KikScore takes public information about the online business (e.g. site security, traffic, links, domain registration, privacy policies, consumer reviews) and joins it with permitted information about the business owner (e.g. financial stability, public records)  — ultimately creating a tailored recommendation of the shopping experience to be expected.  This helps potential customers feel more comfortable doing business with a lesser-known small business.  Math…leveling the playing field for online sellers and bolstering trust for online shoppers.  Take that, Geography!

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Make Me A Clown Now! While You Are At It Teach Me What to Expect When I Start Selling Online Part 2

This is the second part of the two part posting about starting to sell online. You can read the first part here.

Yes, you can be a clown and you can start selling online pretty quickly. You can even be a clown while you are selling online. The trick is to make sure you do not act like a clown when you get set up to start selling online. This post will cover some key items that every person who wants to take their business online needs to think about as they get going.

Test, Test, Test

It is painful, but you must be constantly testing changes to the website. The tests should not be wholesale changes, but should be controlled. So many people focus on getting the product line-up just right, or the purchase flows streamlined or the website to have the ideal color. The truth is you need to keep testing changes to your website. Nearly every component should be tested to see how visitors to your website interact with the website. Controlled testing is key. That is commonly known as A/B testing and here is a great summary of A/B testing. It basically means you show a change to the website to only 50% or so of the visitors and 50% of the visitors do not see the change. The analysis that is so valuable is what happens to the other 50% of visitors who see the changed website. Do they convert at a higher rate, do they stay on the website longer, do they click the new link that you added etc. This is the value of testing and more testing until you optimize the various areas of your site, but even then continued testing will help you as shoppers’ habits evolve.

Be Flexible

This may be the most important of all. To be a seller online, you need to be flexible. You may think that customers and shoppers will respond a certain way, but you need to be prepared to expect the unexpected. Inflexible folks just can not make it as merchants online.  Even better, if you are flexible and are addressing your customers needs that will create customer loyalty with your business.  Remember customers like to deal with businesses that listen to them and also take action on customer feedback. This flexibility can also lead to your customers being your best advocates through word of mouth recommendations about your business and products.  All of this from just listening to your customers and acting on their feedback!

These are just a few of the things to keep in mind. Do you have any lessons learned from your experience selling online that you want to share?

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Make Me A Clown Now! While You Are At It Teach Me What to Expect When I Start Selling Online Part 1

Yes, you can be a clown and you can start selling online pretty quickly. You can even be a clown while you are selling online. The trick is to make sure you do not act like a clown when you get set up to start selling online. This post will cover some key items that every person who wants to take their business online needs to think about as they get going.

Website

There are many ways to approach your website. Many people just jump in a buy a ready-made template from a website template company. Be careful of doing that too quickly. The trick is that before you actually dive into buying a template or building your website, you must take the time to plan out a few things about your website. Take some time to review websites that sell similar products that you are going to sell or are in a similar industry so you can see different looks and feels for websites. After you have done this, sketch out the pages of your planned website on a piece of paper. This will help you visualize your website and better inform you when you get to the point where you are considering different options for templates or designers that will design your website. The key is taking a few minutes to plan out the vision of your website. If you do that, the process for building your actual website will run a lot smoother. Too many people just skip this step and go to the template or design stage and do this on the fly. You can do this, but it will be a much bigger challenge than if you planned it out.

Your community

Customers…..Who are going to be your customers for the products that you sell? Figure out who are the customers, but go one step further and try to think about the influencers for the customers. That is the community that you want to build for your website and your products. For example, a seller of athletic equipment like wrist wraps and weights are selling to customers that want to use this equipment to get healthy. But other influencers for this can be athletic clubs and personal trainers. As the seller of the equipment thinks about building a community through a blog or other forms of social media, the seller should aim to serve the greater community of customers and influencers in order to build a community of followers.

Tracking and Interacting with Customers

Once a customer has purchased from you that is not the end of your relationship. Now as a seller online, especially where shoppers have so many options it is imperative that sellers maintain a relationship with the customer. Part of this is selfish because only the customer can give you feedback about their experience with the products that you have sold them. But more importantly, the customer’s feedback before, during and after the purchase experience will give you important feedback that will help you improve your customer experience. Without it, you are literally flying blind. So how do you interact and track customers. There are a number of customer tracking applications that will help you work to interact with your customers. These include Kampyle (feedback tracker), SugarCRM (customer relationship manager) and CrowdSound (feedback widget). Not to mention, you can always just pick up the phone or email the customer to get feedback. This may be the most underrated way to interact with customers because most sellers just do not think about doing that. Call your customer! You will not regret it, but be prepared for the feedback because it could be brutally honest.

Stayed tuned for Part 2 of this post tomorrow.

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Increasing Online Sales by Increasing Trust: Part 2

This is the second part of a 2 part posting about increasing online sales by increasing trust.

As we discussed yesterday, the lack of trust is costing online retailers billions of dollars in lost revenue. Today we will talk about trust marks and the statistics that support the notion that online shoppers are more likely to purchase from a merchant that prominently displays a trust mark, and as a result, the display of a third party trust mark is one of the more effective solutions for building trust with a merchant’s prospective customer.

Market research has shown that third party trust marks alleviate the security concerns of online shoppers. A recent study investigated the security concerns of online shoppers and the value trust marks hold in the minds of consumers. The following statistics are from an August 2006 study conducted by TNS, an independent research firm:

The overwhelming majority of consumers feel it is important for sites to include a trust mark.

● 86% of U.S. online shoppers say it is important for an E-commerce site to include a trust mark of some kind on their site.

● 89% of online shoppers expect to see a trust mark displayed on a Web site’s home page. 85% also expect to see trust marks displayed on the page where personal information is entered and where the final transaction is completed.

● 65% of online consumers shop only at sites they know and trust, while 42% of online shoppers prefer to make purchases through sites that include a trust mark.

Shoppers not only recognize and value third party trust marks, but the presence of a trust mark can also persuade them to complete the purchase.

● 65% of online shoppers have terminated an online order because they did not “trust” the transaction. 53% of these shoppers indicate that the presence of a seal would have likely prevented the termination.

Finally, these concerns are translating into lost revenue for merchants. According to a survey of 10,000 households by the Conference Board in 2006, 41% of those households are purchasing less online than they did a year before. And with good reason, in 2005, identity theft cost consumers alone $680 million.

In a recent article published by eMarketer titled “Few Convert at Retail E-commerce Sites: Many Shop. Few Buy”, published on April 9, 2007, Jeffrey Grau, an eMarketer Senior Analyst, reported that online merchants convert an average of 2%-3% of their site visitors into buyers. However, he observed that retailers with industry-leading conversion rates are doing more than just looking at numbers. Mr. Grau adds that “online retailers who go beyond using traditional Web analytics data to truly understand their customers’ intentions, perceptions and concerns will be rewarded with higher conversion rates [i.e., increased sales].”

>It has been my experience, and as evidenced by some of the industry numbers provided above, that the lack of trust and the perception of insecurity are major inhibitors precluding online commerce from reaching its full potential. General concerns surrounding trust, security and performance affect all online merchants (large and small); however, smaller and lesser known merchants are plagued more so by these genuine consumer concerns. Accordingly, a merchant looking to increase their online sales should think long and hard about addressing the trust and security concerns of their customers by providing more of information that will help their prospective customers know that they [the merchant] can be trusted.

NOTE: If you are interested in reviewing the data sources for some of the numbers/statistics quoted in these postings, please send an email to support@kikscore.com and we will be more than happy to provide the data sources.

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Increasing Online Sales by Increasing Trust: Part 1

More Information.  More Trust.  More Sales.

–>Lack of Trust

We’ve all have read or heard about the reports of the phenomenal growth of e-commerce; however, what we do not hear about as much is that its full growth potential is being restrained and inhibited by feelings of insecurity and lack of trust. I don’t want to throw a bunch of numbers at you, but you will notice that this particular blog posts has more numbers/statistics than usual because I think it’s important to see the numbers to really drive home the message of how important it is develop trust with your customers. I can’t help but think about a Gartner Group report that stated that consumer jitters over security cost online retailers nearly $2 billion in lost sales in 2006.

According to that same Gartner Group report, just over 46% of the 155 million U.S. adults who go online admitted that misgivings about information theft, data breaches, or Web-based attacks have affected their purchasing, online transaction, or e-mail behavior. and 85% are concerned that they could become victims of identity theft. Accordingly, one of the problems the internet and the e-commerce industry faces overall, and small to medium sized businesses in particular, is the need to provide customers with a sufficient amount of information transparency to enable potential customers of a merchant to make an informed trust decision about that merchant’s performance capabilities. Ultimately, each prospective customer either objectively or subjectively asks and answers the following questions when they visit an online merchant’s store: (i) “Do I trust this merchant with my personally identifiable and financial information?” (ii) “Will this merchant keep my information secure?” and (iii) “Will this merchant perform appropriately?” If the answers are “No”, it really does not matter how cheap the merchant’s product is relative to its competitors, the transaction stops there. As a result, a genuine customer need has arisen for indications of trust and security. Consequently, a whole industry has developed around messaging security and trust to customers via trust marks and seals.

Tomorrow Part 2 of this post will discuss these trust marks and seals.

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WSJ Article — Online Reviews Suffer From Grade Inflation

A recent Wall Street Journal Article examined a troubling trend with online shopping reviews — that these reviews benefit from higher grade inflation than a star power forward at Duke.  As Geoffrey Fowler and Joesph De Avila write, the average review given is 4.3/5 stars.  There are a handful of explanations offered for this trend, including  psychological — people are more likely to remember positive experiences.  But the most interesting reason offered is that critical reviews are removed from the calculation and reviewers are repeatedly critical are barred from some sites.  While this practice definitely skews the reliability of these reviews, I’m sure it’s similar to the corrective action taken when a rogue Spanish professor tries to fail that same Duke power forward for skipping language lab.  It’s simply not going to happen — or if it does happen, that Spanish professor will not be teaching at Duke very long.

Back to the point.  While shopper/user reviews can be very helpful, if the grade inflation persists, they will just become an empty marketing tool.  Continuing the academia analogy, using these inflated reviews to make shopping decisions (and who to share your personal information with) will be like getting a medical referral from the hacky-sack playing hippie who is in the 7th year of his Pre-Med undergrad.  I’ll go easy on our product pitch, but the ability for these reviews to be marked up (or less than objective) was a big motivation to create KikScore.  More on that later.  Until then, let’s all start providing realistic shopper reviews.

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Who Do I Trust? Who Do I Trust? Me, That’s Who!

Trust. It’s essential to any purchase. It’s also a big deal to Tony Montana (aka Scarface). Why do I bring him up? Because, in addition to giving pop culture the famous quote above, Tony’s business had to deal with trust issues. In the beginning, he was a small business – working much harder than more well-known “entrepreneurs.” It was only after years of building a large customer base that potential buyers knew he was a trusted source of “product.” And only then could Tony take a little time off, buy a big mansion, fly off into paranoid coke-fueled fits of rage and get into a shoot-out with 40 gunmen. Tony’s story is every small business’ story. And we here at KikScore want to help you build your business’ trust factor up quickly – so you can get going on that big mansion and violent death.

Your mom was right — Appearance is Everything. Offering a low price, without a professional looking website, business contact information and customer references – well, it’s like getting a letter from a Nigerian princess who will double your money in 60 days. It just sounds too good to be true. Too many people have been burned by other “great” deals. Low prices alone won’t cut it. Spend some time personalizing your site, give people some details on you and your business, make sure there is a support email, get some customer references. Include on your site what you would like to see if you were shopping on an unknown site (with an awesome price on a TV).

Don’t be a Wall Flower. Communicate with potential shoppers via a corporate blog (you’re reading this…I’m sure consumers will read yours…unless it’s boring…but then again, so is this and you continue to read this…whatever, write a damn blog already). Log on to Meetup.com, attend some local functions, and discuss your business. The more people you communicate with, the more people will know (and will write about) you. This will increase shopper confidence that you’re not a Nigerian princess…unless you actually are.

Take Care of the Football. So you’re a legitimate business, with a professional looking site. Heck, you even write a well-known blog. Business is growing, life seems grand. That is until some bad guy steals your customers’ credit card and personal information – because you didn’t keep that information secure or have encrypted transactions. After that, you’ll have plenty of customer contact…via their lawyers. Take information security seriously (and let your customers know what you are doing to keep their information safe).

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Creating a Website, Easy Creating a Brand, Not So Much

You have a product/service, a cool domain name (though not as cool as KiKscore), a website, some way to charge people and electricity. But do you have a business? Well, you probably do, but is it successful? I guess it depends upon your definition of success. Some philosophers believe that success can be found in the mere attempt of an activity, regardless of the outcome. But those philosophers are probably the ones that didn’t finish high school and have no money, so why listen to them.

I may have digressed. Ok, the point is just having a site doesn’t mean you have a customer base. How do you get one? Easy. Just buy my new 13 step program (available only on LaserDisk) “Getting a Customer Base the Dojo Master Mike Way”. Or, instead you could start building up your brand in the marketplace (though I think the LaserDisk purchase is a smarter way to go).

The biggest obstacle that small/new businesses face is that they are competing against established/well known competitors. You have to create a known brand if your company is going to have staying power. And there are a lot of different thoughts on brand. The one I like the best is that a brand denotes a certain type of customer experience. Any Starbucks that you go to you can expect the same type of drinks, pastries and horrible folk music. No matter what you think of Starbucks, you know that there brand relates to a certain type of experience. That’s what every small business hopes to aspire – creating a customer expectation with their business (as long as it is a positive experience).

To create your brand and your positive customer expectation, the focus has to be on consistency. Wild differences in your service level will discourage repeat business or referrals. Also be open to customer feedback…making changes to your service/product that incorporates those suggestions.

What about getting the word out about your business? Most small/new businesses don’t have a large advertising budget. But as everyone knows, there are many ways to create attention these days. I think the best way to create buzz is through a hunger strike or some type of large-scale arson attack. But others prefer optimizing their website, sponsored links on search engines, referral links from other websites, and gaining attention on social media sites. To each their own, I guess. Whatever you do, make sure to keep in mind your brand and what you want the excepted experience to be.

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