Verifying Integrity

Shopping on the web is seeing a 50% increase in growth over last year. In part, the credit for this explosive growth can be attributed to efforts in the technical and marketing areas to build consumer confidence. One other area that might be helping within e-commerce sites are the so-called consumer watchdog sites or rating systems on the net. There are several agencies on-line now that benefit both the web site owner who is marketing services/products and his/her potential customer.

The advantage for an Internet entrepreneur, is to help ease your potential customers fears by participating in one of the programs which reviews your site not just for content, but also based on business practices. When you’re accredited, visitors to your site will see an “emblem” on your page to signify that you have pledged to follow ethical and fair business practices. These agencies benefit the consumer and the merchant in a variety of ways, one of the most important being by providing a publicly viewable scoring system for the store; allowing the consumer to rate competitive outlets on-line. Another nice feature is that many of these organizations provide an independent feedback desk which allows for the posting of anonymous comments to be forwarded to the company, either to let them know how pleased they are, or if they feel have been let down.

There are many of these organizations available on the web, some like BBBonline are well known brick and mortar organizations which have made the jump to on-line reviews.