robsnell - 4:17 am on Oct 6, 2006 (gmt 0)

...if the overall design of your site conveys trustworthiness the logo will have a lower (or negative) effect than if your design does not.

Maybe less sophisticated Web shoppers feel better shopping when they see an obvious trust symbol.

Hopefully I'm not insulting any of my customers, but I feel pretty safe saying that this site's demographic is at least of average if not below average Web surfing / online shopping experience.

This conclusion is based upon the e-mail and phone questions I get, as well as where my best converting traffic comes from, and the keywords they use to find the site and buy.

I'm also comparing these shoppers with shoppers on the ~500 or so other Yahoo! Stores I've been involved with over the past almost 10 years.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the "trustworthiness" of this site. I believe in and try to implement Jakob Nielsen's best practices for usability. I get feedback from thousands of users which is all over the damn map, too. Half of them want this feature and the other half want the exact opposite.

Ultimately, I'm always looking for more ways to improve my conversion rate and provide a better shopping experience, which is why I'm posting here.

One last thing though, the Hackersafe folks were a little disappointed that we only moved the needle 5%. It started out at about a 15% increase (which would have meant something like a $500K annual increase!) and only flattened out in the last half of the test.

I guess the moral of the story for me is that every Web site if different, so you better A/B test the hell out of any "best practice," otherwise you'll never really know for sure.

Vertster, here I come! -- Rob