Who Are You? Why Should I Trust Buying from You?

Somehow you’ve attracted me to your site. You have an intriguing product. You have a solution I might be interested in. I want to learn more.

But before I can go on, you put hurdles in my way. I can’t get beyond your splash page without giving you my contact information.

Or I may be interested in subscribing, about to give you my credit card information and I stop.

Who are you? Are you real? Are the people behind your company? Why should I trust you with this information? Is your offering real or am I just part of some A/B testing for your MVP?

Unfortunately, I’m a human being and your only presence to me is a web page in the ether.

I worry about giving my personal and credit card information. Who am I giving it to? How will it be used? Can I trust you?

You want to know very critical things about me, you are asking me to start paying you, but I don’t know who you are. So why should I buy? Why should I give you even my name and email? How do I establish some relationship with you or should I just connect my bot with your bot?

When I search your site to get answers I get frustrated. Is there a name? Is there a phone number? Is there a human being running the business? What’s the track record, who are you, is it a business or solution that I can trust and that I can trust with information about me.

I want to have information about you, not just your product. If I’m going to invest in you, whether it’s my time, my name/email, or my money, I want to know that I am dealing with a real business, with real people, and real solutions. I resent being part of a fancy experiment to test your idea—long before you have a product. MVP isn’t a web splash page—though that’s what too many think.

Why am I forced to find a privacy statement or a terms and condition page on your site to find this information? Why do you make it so hard for me to even find those, why do you still hide your identity?

Who do I contact if something goes wrong? What happens if I have a problem? How do I even let you know this is a cool idea and solution?

I know you may be a very small company. I know you may have no office and your people scattered around. I know you may be a startup and there may be some risk to buying your solution. If too few people buy, you might go out of business.

But I don’t know who you are.

I’m pretty good at filtering through scams–but there are so many out there. They don’t look that much different from you. Even if you are totally legitimate, others who have been equally legitimate have misused my information, or billed me unexpectedly or inappropriately.

As a result, I’m wary. I want to know more. Your FAQs aren’t doing it for me.

Unfortunately, I’m a human being. I want to know there are human beings behind the web page and the product. I want to have some confidence that you are real. I want to be able to trust you, that there’s something more, or that I can trust you with the information you want from me.

There’s an app out there that’s the latest in this round of mystery apps and companies. You looked like you addressed some very important issues. 20 minutes ago, I was about to subscribe. I was about to hand over my credit card information. I was also about to recommend a number of my clients consider you.

But you are being coy. I couldn’t find out whether you are real. Instead of buying and promoting your app. I wrote this article.

Ironically, you probably don’t know the opportunity you missed. Your analytics will show an abandoned shopping cart. They’ll show that I got to the point of almost entering my name, email, and credit card number, but stopped. You are probably curious why.

Now you know.