Trust badges and conversions: what to expect
Can a trust badge help your webshop convert? What a badge can and cannot do, where to place it, how to measure the effect and what EU rules say.
Shop owners often read that a trust badge will raise their conversion rate by a fixed percentage. Be careful with such figures. The effect depends on your shop, your buyers and the badge, and most published numbers come from a single test or from companies that sell badges. What can be said is this.
Why buyers hesitate
Someone who has never heard of your shop has to trust you with their money and their details. Research into checkout abandonment regularly lists doubts about payment security and about the seller among the reasons people leave. A badge can answer part of that doubt, if buyers recognise it and can check it.
What a badge can do
- Show that an independent party looked at your shop.
- Let a buyer click through to a public profile with the details, instead of taking your word for it.
- Show reviews from real buyers that you cannot edit.
A badge does not fix a slow site, unclear delivery costs or a complicated checkout. Those usually matter more.
What makes a badge credible
- It links to a profile on the issuer's own website.
- The issuer actually checks something and explains what.
- A shop cannot pay for a better result.
- It shows current information, not a picture that never changes.
Where to place it
Put it where people decide: near the add-to-cart button, in the basket and in the checkout, and in the footer so it is on every page. Keep it small and calm. A row of logos looks less trustworthy than one mark people can check.
Measure it yourself
If you want to know what a badge does for your shop, test it. Show it to half of your visitors for a few weeks and compare orders. Wait until you have enough orders for the difference to mean something.
Keep to the rules
Under EU law it is an unfair commercial practice to show a trust mark or quality mark without permission from the organisation behind it. Only use badges you have earned, and make sure the data behind them is correct.
The CheckShop trust mark
Every shop checked by CheckShop has a public profile. You can claim yours for free by e-mail on your own domain and then show the basic trust mark on your site for free. It shows your score and links to your profile. Paid plans start at €4.99 a month (excl. VAT) and add a badge designer and review invitations after a purchase. Every plan, the free one included, has the dashboard and the weekly recheck. See CheckShop for shops.
Fler guider
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- Free trust mark for your webshop: what it shows and how to add itWhat the free CheckShop trust mark shows your buyers, what it does not promise, and how to add it to WooCommerce, Shopify or any other shop system.
- How to get more reviews without breaking the EU review rulesThe EU Omnibus rules on consumer reviews in plain language, and five ways to collect more reviews from real buyers that stay within them.