Customer Ratings inspire Customer Confidence

If you're running (or planning to start) a home-based business on the web, how do you establish credibility and trust among your site visitors so that they might become customers? The best way is to give your site visitors something verifiable from outside your website to let them know that you are indeed a legitimate business.

In this blog post, I talked about using the Better Business Bureau to accomplish this. That's one way. Another way is to provide customer ratings from past customers to your prospective customers.

If you're selling on eBay, this is automatically taken care of by the feedback system. If you're selling products on your own website, you can use pay-per-performance sites such as BizRate or Shopping.Com. In the case of BizRate, you can place a seal on your site that allows your site visitors to see your customer generated ratings - including commentary.

If you're doing an exceptional job of customer service, these ratings will be in your favor. If you're not, then they'll reflect that too, but you will be able to work on those issues and improve them. In either case, there's nothing like reading what existing customers have to say to inspire trust with new customers.