Digital window shoppers wandering through cyberspace may be click-happy, but turning browsers into buyers is just as difficult on the World Wide Web as it is in the bricks and mortar marketplace. And sometimes, the determining factor in making the sale is simple security cue, according to a recent study by
McAfee Inc.The report looked at the behaviour of 163 million online shoppers and found that when a security cue like McAfee’s SECURE trustmark was shown to online consumers, sales conversions were 10.85 per cent higher in that group compared to those who were not exposed.
“That can be really, really significant,” said Shane Keats, a McAfee research analyst who penned the study. “An 11 per cent boost in sales conversion is tremendous in this economy.”
Keats is confident that the findings weren’t arbitrary because the data was compiled over two years, gathering statistics from 2.6 million purchases.
Andrew Patrick, a research consultant and adjunct professor of psychology and computer science at
Carleton University in Ottawa, was not surprised by the results of the survey, but regarded the findings cautiously.
“The level of improvement that they’re reporting, which is 10.85 per cent … is rather modest,” he said. “That’s high in some ways and low in some ways. The fact that people can be influenced by (the McAfee SECURE trustmark) that much is somewhat surprising, but we know that people are having difficulty making trust decisions and are looking for what’s called institutional authorities to help them with their trust decisions and McAfee would represent in this case, an institutional authority.”
