Build Your Ecommerce Credibility With The About Us Page

Posted on October 30, 2013 by Pawel Grabowski in Conversion Rate, Marketing, Merchandising / Design with 0 Comments

What if told you that I know exactly why you don’t get as many sales as you hoped for?

Nah, it’s probably another useless crap about traffic, lack of email list, poor product descriptions, no free shipping, weak calls to action or who knows what else, you say.

Wrong (although all those things do play a huge part in the process too).

It’s credibility.

You are just not credible enough for customers to buy from you.

Selling online is all about building trust.

I am not sure how many times I actually said these words here on Ecommerce Insiders. Probably many and definitely not enough. Trust is still a greatly overlooked factor in ecommerce.

Sure, many shops list a phone number, their address, an email address and set up SSL connection to secure their transactions.

Yet, a quick skim over their “about us” page demolishes any other efforts they make.

While striving to offer you the finest selection of [product], acme.com also goes out of its way to offer you the best shopping experience on the internet. We’re large enough to offer you the top [product], [product] Tools and Accessories available, yet small enough to think of you as a valued customer rather than a number.

The above is a company description I found online (I only removed the product name and the company, everything else is left as it was on the page).

Does that sound like something that could build trust? Not really. Yet, it is one of the many similar descriptions you can find among online stores.

Their “about us” pages are either overbloated self proclaiming pieces created probably only to muster their ego or a one sentence microcopy that has nothing to do with what customers expect today.

Either way, if this is a content you have on your “about us” page you have a serious problem.

Here’s how you can fix that.

What’s the about us page for anyway?

Before we talk about the ways to fix your “about us” page, let’s talk about why do you actually need it anyway. Sure, it is a page whose purpose is to introduce your company to the visitor and offer some sort of background information, but that’s not all.

An “about us” page is there also to:

Show that you are a real company
that there are people behind this site
outline your company’s culture and tell the reader what they can expect from you
present you as an authority and someone worth buying from
tell your story and
make you more believable

All in all, it is to create a sense of trust and credibility in you and your offering. However, in many cases companies use their about us page to brag.

All they do is state:

how great the company is
how great their products are
how great their employees are
what an amazing customer service they provide

But is bragging enough to make customers trust you enough to buy from you?

I sincerely doubt it.

So instead of just talking about you, why don’t you try to include these 7 things on your “about us” page.

The Ideal About Us Page Structure

Who And Where Are You – First and foremost, tell your visitors who are you and where you actually are. Quite often customers look for companies located close to where they are. There are various reasons for that, shipping costs might be one of them but not the only one. Also, depending on the type of a product, it might have to be delivered by a dedicated courier company (or the company selling the item provides the transportation, i.e. in a case of bed mattresses) and customers might want to buy someone who is more local to them. All in all, stating this information is crucial.
Why Are You Qualified To Sell This Product – Do you have any extensive knowledge of the product? Have you been selling it for a substantial amount of time? Is there anything else that makes you knowledgeable about this product? State all this on the about us page too. After all, that creates trust, no?
What Would Make a Customer to Trust You – What are your qualifications, professional memberships, associations, professional badges that would make you a trustworthy resource for the product?
Show Your People – Who are you personally? Who else is there on your team? Show that there are real people behind your organization. Nothing builds trust more than seeing that there is actually someone behind the site you just visited for the first time.
Don’t Exaggerate – Are you a small company, perhaps you run the store on your own? Don’t hide this fact or exaggerate on the company’s size. Be brutally honest about the business. Most customers will appreciate it even more. Not to mention that many people prefer to buy from smaller companies and are not really looking for corporations to do business with.
Tell A Story – Why are you doing what you are doing? If there is a reason, or a story behind this, tell it. People love stories. In fact, they make us more human. It is through stories that we build bonds with other people.
Include Your Pictures – Last but not least, include pictures of you and your staff. Sure, you might not be overly happy about it but they will further make you more real in the eyes of your potential customers. And this is crucial if you want to make it in ecommerce.

If you look carefully at the above anathomy of an about us page, one thing becomes clear:

The main goal for this page is to make you more real and credible to your customers.

The advantage brick and mortar stores have over us is that they can build that personal connection straight away and without any problems. There are people behind the counter or on the shop floor and they all contribute to this bond buliding.

Online, you are all the time behind the glass screen of a computer or any other device. You thus need to be more active in building that relationship. Making yourself and your staff look more real to your customers is a great first step.

What if you don’t have a story?

There is one more thing I want to touch on before I go.

You may have entered ecommerce to sell a particular product you just found a great demand for (and it’s cheap to sell at a good margin). Yet, that’s probably not an angle you want to present to your customers, right?

So, how do you tell a story if all you did was find a profitable niche and build a site selling those products? Well, if you look at it closely, you probably know a lot about this product by now. You must since you built the site, write blog posts on various topics related to the niche and products, you created custom product descriptions and so on. Perhaps you even started using the product yourself or at least know someone who does.

Play on that. State that you weren’t always the user but have converted after reading so much about the product. Sure, it might be bending the truth a little but it’s still better than stating you’re not even interested in the product you sell.

That certainly wouldn’t help in building your reputation.

Conclusion

In order to sell online you need to have your customers know you, like you and trust you. Only once they feel you are a credible resource, may they buy from you.

An “about us” page is one of the best channels to introduce yourself as a resource to your customers and start building a relationship with them.