The day after Thanksgiving, known as “Black Friday,” is traditionally the most lucrative day for U.S. retailers. But during these troubled economic times, shoppers will be taking a more cautious approach to how much they spend and where they spend their holiday dollars. For online retailers in the sprawling, highly competitive cyber mall, that means finding ways to stand out from the crowd to attract shoppers and keep them coming back—from Black Friday to the post-holiday clearance season and beyond.

Economic issues aside, shoppers and online retailers alike are more susceptible to threats during the holiday rush. Along with an abundance of holiday cheer, there will be more spam, more phishing, and more online scams of every stripe. Hackers are opportunists, so everyone should be extra careful. Parents, for example, are under pressure to make sure their kids aren’t disappointed, so they’ll be scouting out the trendiest toys and games. And, you can be sure that cyber crooks will be right behind them, hatching social engineering schemes associated with the hottest holiday products.

Given consumers’ concerns about the security of ecommerce, which has been well documented by various research organizations, building trust is one of the greatest challenges online retailers face all year round. There must be trust on the part of the consumer when e-tailers ask for personal I.D. information and credit card numbers. Once trust is established, e-tailers have the opportunity to turn a site visitor into a customer, and then over time, into loyal franchises or repeat customers.

With some creativity and a low investment, there are quite a few things online retailers can do now to make sure consumers have a safer shopping experience—and prosper during this economic slowdown.

Start with Security

1. Give shoppers a safety blanket
After more than a decade of online retailing, tens of millions of consumers still don’t like giving out their credit card number, while millions more simply won’t give it out at all, choosing to remain on the sidelines of the ecommerce revolution. If a consumer doesn’t trust you with their personal financial information because he or she isn’t convinced you will properly protect it, you won’t close the sale. According to the Pew Internet Project conducted in February, 2008, 75 percent of consumers don't like giving out personal information like a credit card number.

To score high marks with online consumers who worry about the security of their personal information and increase your online sales, follow these precautions:

• Website security—E-tailers should look for a service that includes multiple levels of security technology, along with multiple ways to promote the certified security to visitors. A comprehensive solution, such as McAfee® SECURE™ service, helps ensure that the web site is secure from more than 10,000 threats giving consumers added protection from identity theft.
  
  In addition, McAfee SECURE also tests for other security risks. As malicious fraudsters become more clever, many businesses that have secured their sites against hacking may inadvertently leave themselves vulnerable to other forms of attack. That’s why, in addition to this daily hacker testing, certified McAfee SECURE sites also undergo a series of periodic tests for accidental practices that can lead to bad publicity and lost customer confidence. Nothing will hurt your good name faster than a rapidly propagated online story about how your site actually infected visitors with malware. To help prevent this, McAfee SECURE testing includes checks for unwitting linking to malicious web sites, the hidden presence of browser exploit code, and the accidental sharing of customer email data with spammers.




• Trustmarks
  
  • Trustmark placement—Trustmarks should be added to the first points of engagement with site visitors, especially search landing pages. Because the points of engagement are widely diverse, this means broadly populating them on your home page and throughout all catalog pages. The reason is that the risk-conscious shopper whose behavior can be modified by a trustmark will probably never get into the shopping cart. They will be long gone. If you choose trustmarks, like McAfee SECURE trustmark, don’t wait until they get to the cart to start the conversation about security with visitors. In addition, remember that “eye level is buy level.” The more prominently the trustmark appears on your site, the greater the conversion rate from window shoppers to buyers.
  
  
  
  • Increased conversion rates—In addition to the assistance McAfee SECURE service provides retailers in protecting themselves against hackers and data thieves, the trustmark also has a proven affect of increasing site conversion by making more of those risk-averse or risk-conscious shoppers comfortable. The result is usually higher conversion, which has been documented in more than 1,000 tests since 2002. In these tests, we changed a single variable, that is, whether or not shoppers saw McAfee SECURE trustmark on a retailer’s website. When shoppers saw that a retail website security was certified by McAfee security, conversion rates increased more than ten percent on average compared to the sites where the shoppers did not see McAfee SECURE trustmark.


• Don’t spam—Even if you have an opt-in subscriber base, don’t overwhelm them with a constant flood of emails every week. This isn’t trust building. This is also the type of email practice that would flag you with in McAfee SECURE and McAfee SiteAdvisor® software.



• Offer alternative payment options—In recent years, according to online trade media such as Internet Retailer, e-merchants have seen good results and increased site conversion and revenue dollars by offering alternate payment options such as Bill Me Later. Including logos of third-party payment providers on your site can help assuage payment concerns that people might have.



• SSL Certification—The padlock icon in the web browser is the oldest trust recommendation in the online retailing world. SSL security begat the original trustmark, dating back to the mid-1990s. While it actually doesn’t provide any protection for data stored on your web server, consumers still expect to see the icon in addition to website security certification. Another important issue with SSL certification is the importance of keeping your certificates current. Don’t let them expire.

• Hang on to your old URLs—Revive URLs you might have used during past holiday seasons, and update the content. That way, you can keep any links to these pages from your website without having to set up permanent redirects.



• Refresh your sitemaps—If you carry special holiday items, make sure those items are listed in your XML sitemap. Alternatively, you can set up a special holiday sitemap that can be deleted later. This is also a good time to include internal links to special holiday sale sections from your HTML sitemap. This may not improve search engine optimization (SEO) rankings, but it will offer a clear crawl path for spiders to find and index the new URLs—as long as you don’t use JavaScript dropdowns or mouseovers.



• Freshen up your title tags—While you may not have time to update every title tag on your site, you can optimize some key title tags to improve SEO rankings



• Generate incoming links—In-store promotions, online giveaways, and press coverage when you donate goods and services can link to targeted destinations on your site to draw shoppers and improve rankings. Take advantage of social networking sites by promoting hot items or by asking bloggers to review your products. You might also consider boosting RSS newsfeeds with targeted keywords in headlines.



• Keep an eye on metrics—Every time you try a new tactic, check your sales metrics and your SEO rankings, so that you know what worked for future reference.