Apollo Hosting- Company Blog

On the edge of your seat about this one, I bet... What's it about? Angora sweaters? Though they are both warm and fuzzy, the answer is "no." Shetland sheepdog puppies? Indeed, though both warm and fuzzy, as well as cute and adorable, it is, alas, not the topic. As all suspense must eventually come to an end- the topic is:

Trust.

Ah, trust, perhaps an oft-overlooked element in online dealings. Hopefully you've noticed our brand new "Hacker Safe" logos debuting across the site. I would hope you have, since I went to a bit of trouble to make them very to hard miss. I suppose the question becomes, "Fine, but were you 'Hacker Safe' before?" The answer is yes, we were, but you didn't know that. In fact, it might not have crossed your mind to think about it before you saw that graphic in the first place.

But does it make you think?

Hard to miss the increasingly widespread reports of online credit card fraud and complete identify theft making the rounds over the past few years. People are gradually coming around to the realization that others of their kind are using the boon of Internet ecommerce for nefarious purposes. Here at Apollo, we've always made a point to keep your information safe. Though we can't stop officials from the Department of Veterans Affairs from taking your personal info home on a laptop where it can be purloined, we can make it very hard to pry out of our servers. We have always secured our servers, and continue to do.

Assessing trust on a website is lot harder than doing so in a "brick and mortar" establishment, where it can still be fairly hard if said establishment being run by someone highly skilled in deception. If you walk into a store, you have a sense of immediate "legitimacy" simply by the presence of four (or even more) walls and a roof. Someone obviously went to a lot of trouble to build the store and stock it with merchandise. You see the store, you see the merchandise. You can place your well-manicured, consumer hands on said products and assess their value with a great deal more precision than is possible when the only information one has available is some ill-compressed JPEGs.

For the most part, the trust battle is won on the front doorstep of a brick and mortar establishment, by virtue of that front doorstep's very existence. Trust can still be impacted by external factors, such as the "neighborhood", the quality of the merchandise itself, and even the local reputation of the store. Such factors can effect trust positively or negatively, and they work for both brick and mortar and online stores.

There are a lot of parallels to be drawn. If you're a small online store, perhaps you want to try to achieve the "legitimacy" of a mall kiosk, which certainly engenders more trust than a flea market booth or street corner stand, each of which could be roughly equal in size to the kiosk, but neither of which appear quite so "trustworthy" to a passing inspection. Perhaps the ultimate goal is to achieve a kind of "unique upscale boutique" feel to the store. Those look very legitimate, after all.

That's why ScanAlert's "Hacker Safe" emblem is important. It's an element of trust. It conveys the sentiment that this is an organization that is both aware of threats online and takes measures against them. You can trust that your data, your very personal facts and financial information, is well in hand with this organization. Apollo offers our customers deep discounts, up to 70%, off the very same ScanAlert Hacker Safe product we use. We trust it, and you can too. Click here to learn more.

It's far easier to deceive online than in real life, so having the Hacker Safe seal can ease the mind of worried customers who are concerned about their information. Any customer should be these days, after all. Perhaps no amount of assurance can fully achieve the titular "warm and fuzzy" feelings, but it's a good start. Other tips for increasing your "online legitimacy profile" are pretty straightforward.

Accept Credit Cards
Having a merchant account/payment gateway and being able to accept credit card orders isn't exactly a perquisite for needing the "Hacker Safe" product. You could still easily deal in private, personal information that needs to be protected without that data including credit card information. In terms of an online store, though, being able to accept credit card information is something of the ultimate double-edged sword. The good is that is conveys that sense of legitimacy for which you strive. The bad is that customers take making the judgment about your legitimacy far more seriously when it concerns their financial information. Thus, "Hacker Safe" and credit card ordering go hand in hand.

Use SSL
I suppose it would be a matter of concern if everyone didn't know by now this was a "must have", but, as they say... "Just in case." SSL, or "Secure Sockets Layer" is a cryptographic protocol for transmitting information, like your credit card information, securely. Basically, it's a way to make sure, even if someone intercepts your information, they won't be able to read it. To put it another way, it's the thing that causes those little "padlocks" to appear on website browsers. It is, in fact, perfectly possible to deploy a store without SSL, but most people have learned those little "padlocks" are important if they're buying things online, even if they don't know how they work.

Though a perfectly legitimate tip, I admit the inclusion of the "fairly obvious" SSL entry was due in part to the fact that I really wanted to write the word "cryptographic". That, my friend, is a 20 dollar word, at least.

Read the Last Blog
I know, I went over some "store stuff" last time, under the guise of merely "improving" your online ecommerce hosting venture. Well, all those tips apply to trust. Think again in terms of our "brick and mortar" analogy. If you're walking into a run-down, dirty establishment with second hand merchandise in a bad neighborhood, you're going to be a bit more "on guard" than in one of those "upscale boutiques" mentioned earlier. One might argue you're far more likely to be significantly ripped off in the boutique than in the dilapidated store, but again, it's a matter of perception. The upscale boutique puts forth an image that might be intended purely for the purpose of separating rich people from their money in a very legal fashion. If you hope your site will do something similar (in a similarly legal fashion, of course), then make sure it looks and functions well.

The bottom line, do what you can to build trust. Trust not only in presentation but reputation. That's a bit more intangible, but also invaluable. Having a great reputation online can encourage word-of-mouth, or -of-email, or -of-chat, referrals. Loyal customers refer other customers, in part because they trust you. Your service impressed them and gave them a reason for trust.