I could not think of any other forum section that this would fit into, so here goes nothing.
I am interested in building web trust to my website.
I found the following:
I am interested in exploring more web trust seals. Understandably it’s possible to go OTT, and I easily overspend in making myself look safe, that being said if you’re paying for advertising you would want to ensure that all your potential customers trust you.
IMHO, seals are unnecessary.
Just get an SSL certificate that works and shows green in firefox/IE/chrome, and you’re good to go.
After all, you don’t see these seals on any big-name sites. (amazon, newegg, best buy, woot.com, staples, etc)
The only one of those that I have even heard of for anything other than offering trust seals is Comodo who also produce security software. While I trust Comodo for their firewall software since I have tested it and know that it works I wouldn’t trust any of those sites for anything else without also testing it for myself to confirm that it works. I hav e no idea how you would go about testing a trust seal offered by a site that you do not yet trust in order to determine whether you ought to trust their trust seal.
I suspect that the bigger sites don’t use trust seals for much the same reason - they haven’t had anything to do with the sites offering the seals and so have no reason to trust them.
Anyway REPUTATION is what is going to have people either trusting you or not - not whether you can convince some site they have never heard of to give you a trust seal.
In so far as security is concerned (which is completely different from trust) an SSL certificate is what you need for that.
It’s a new ventures which is why I was needing information on trust seals. To be fair, once a website has sales and momentum, then there would be no reason to bother with them. That being said I really do love web of trust. I am likely to have a web of trust seal and an SSL certificate. I probably won’t use Comodo because they are pricier. I can get SSL certifications from as low as 10 dollars per year.
There’s no need to bother with seals to begin with–they don’t really do anything since anyone can get them or fake them. I wouldn’t waste any money to get them. It’s basically a gimmick.
The actual validity (or trust) of an SSL certificate is handled by the Internet’s major certificate authorities, not a jpg/gif image stuck somewhere on your site. Then if you want to check the status of a business, the BBB or resellerratings.com are usually two well-known stops to make.
@Force_Flow;
You’re completely right. Thanks for your help.
Edit: I just came across a completely scam site (investment sector) that had around 6 different seals, some even costing big bucks. I could spend that money advertising or on social media rather than trying to get trust with buy now seals.
I will submit my website to the web of trust, this is completely free, and I do love the concept.
I remember reading some e-commerce usability studies and on payment pages, people felt better when, next to images or names of payment options, they saw something that “looked secure” such as padlock icons and whatnot.
It’s silly but then we never said human psychology was rational or actually bothered to see if those symbols actually mean anything.
Many of our e-commerce clients do have trusted seals on their home pages but those actually mean a link to their chamber of commerce (KvK) numbers and those pages can show things like number of complaints or where to contact to file a complaint, which doesn’t sound much like these other “trust” things.
example upper right: http://www.fonq.be and http://www.fonq.de (different links because different countries) and 2 customers have link-images to http://www.unizo.be/ecommercelabel/labeldragers.jsp (which is more like an organisation linked to consumers’ groups).
It might be a European thing, or it might be some other reason. Most of our clients are small but the fonq one is actually kinda big and old, no they really don’t have a need to “prove” themselves. Maybe some SEO-er told them they’re better off with it 
Well people in the know understand trust seals may mean nothing for the average Joe they can have a huge impact on conversions.
A study by Baymard shows the most well known seals: http://baymard.com/blog/site-seal-trust
There is also reinforcing trust at sensitive points in your checkout process can help with conversions: http://baymard.com/blog/visually-reinforce-sensitive-fields
Take a look at our results from using the TRUSTe Privacy Policy Seal: https://blog.servertastic.com/increasing-conversions-with-a-privacy-policy/
If a site is new it needs to instill trust with visitors ASAP. I recommend an EV cert at the very least and then all or one of the top three from the above study.
If displaying a trust symbol makes any difference to people’s perception of the site then displaying your own trust image that looks somewhat similar to those available from the sites mentioned ought to be just about as effective without the need to involve any other site.
Andy thanks for those Baymard Institute links, those were some of the various study results I’ve read that said similar.
And yeah, what felgall says would also be true unless your image is actually also a link… it had better go somewhere real or real-looking : )
@AndyGambles;
One of the websites I checked out only had three of the top seals, above a 100% money back guarantee. Such tricks are likely to inrease conversion. So it’s suprizing how websites use this to their advantage.
Even though we can all agree that those badges literally mean nothing. They do increase percieved trust, and with this trust comes sales, which is what a website is all about.
For every website it is important to increase the visual trust of online users and customers and it will not be harmful to users data or any type of online transaction they made on website. You should not apply all web trust seal to your site but you should apply the SSL Certificate as per the requirement of site and therefore trust seal too. For example you can apply Extended Validation SSL Certificate and you will get your organization name with green address bar and also get the trusted site seal of the brand which you use for that SSL such as Norton Security, Comodo, Thawte, GeoTrust or RapidSSL. In such way you can increase the repeat users and customers to your site on the basis of secure connection.