Domaine employees working on wireframes together
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Purpose-built for ambitious & beloved brands.

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10 Ecommerce Design Principles: 03. Establish Trust

A Maya Angelou quote reading "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

If you haven’t already, read the intro & summary which explain why I wrote these thoughts down in the first place.


Trust has become an overused and hollow term, like transparency and authenticity. Trust by very nature can’t be explicit, just like “trust me” is a phrase that likely indicates the opposite.

The most well-designed site feels soulless if we don’t trust the brand. The core responsibility of an online experience is to make a customer feel a connection with the brand, a connection in an otherwise cold and digital space. Our role as a team is also to educate the brand in all the ways they can confer trustworthiness.

And just like any other principle - the establishment of trust is a requirement that doesn’t live in one single identifiable place (like a customer review). Trust is stitched together through the way you photograph your product, the tone of your error-copy, the rules of your return policy, how you design and ideally even how you brand the Customer Service modules, and the warmth of your “Thank You” message when the user has signed up for emails.

Our job is to bring humanity and connection into digital interactions. And if we ever said it explicitly, it’d be ruined on the spot.

Authors

Headshot of Marko Bon
Executive
Marko Bon

Co-Founder, President

Meet Marko, co-founder and President of Domaine. Marko is an experienced founder and entrepreneur in digital commerce, and is former VP of ecommerce at multiple enterprise fashion retailers. Marko has more than 23 years of experience in design, UX, personalization & content strategy, site optimization and ecommerce team management.