When customers look to make a purchase online, they want to know they’re dealing with a trustworthy retailer who will offer a great experience. With so many online retailers for any one niche, it can be difficult for the average consumer to determine which stores they can trust. On the flip side, retailers who provide exceptional service also want to demonstrate they’re a trusted retailer. To help both the retailer and potential customer, Google offers the Google Trusted Stores program.
Becoming a Google Trusted Store offers some nice benefits which will help your site stand out from the competition. By successfully becoming a member of the program, your site becomes eligible to display the Trusted Store badge. This badge gives visitors who click on it the information they need to shop on your site with confidence. They’ll find that the store offers reliable shipping and excellent service, which is based on a letter grade determined by Google. This badge will only show up if your site can maintain an ‘A’ rating or better, so really any store where you see this appear, you’ll know offers great service. Shoppers also get the added bonus of opting into free purchase protection. What this mean is that if you’re unable to resolve an issue with the store itself, then Google will help to resolve the problem and can issue a refund of up to $1000. This is just one more reason for consumers to shop with stores included in the program.
Not only will the Google Trusted Store badge show up within your site, but it can also show up within Google Shopping and Google Product Listing Ads. As an account manager, one of the things that we want to accomplish is to make sure our ads stand out from the rest of the pack. The appearance of this badge can differentiate your site and has the potential to help click-through, conversion rates and has even shown to increase average order values.
Before you can have your site listed as a Google Trusted Store, there are a number of steps that you’re going to have to go through. In the sign-up process, you’ll have to add your normal details such as contact information along with customer support contact information. You’ll also need to add links to customer support pages, privacy policy, return policy, shipping policy, and terms of service pages.
Not everyone with an eCommerce store will make it into the program, as there are quite a number of eligibility guidelines. Some of these guidelines include:
- More than 500 orders/month
- On-Time Shipping More than 90%
- Cancellation Rate less than 6%
- 90% of orders must have actual ship date within 3 days of estimated ship date
- Secondary Escalation Rate less than 1 in 5,000 on protected orders
- Refund Resolution (refunds compelled by Google) less than 1 in 15,000 on protected orders
In order to make the Google Trusted Store program work, you’ll need to have a Google Merchant Center Account to link to. Many eCommerce stores will likely already have this setup for Product Listing Ads, so this shouldn’t be a problem. The reason for the GMC account is that they need to be able to track the reliability of your shipping and customer service. To do this, they’ll want shipment and cancellation feeds.
The final step in the process is to add the Google Trusted Stores Badge Code to your site. Once this is completed, you’ll be all setup and ready to go.
Unfortunately, the Google Trusted Stores program is currently only available in the US, but like most other Google services, hopefully this gets rolled out to other countries in the near future.
