You have a company that generates the lion’s share of it’s revenue from an online shop. You spend good deal amount of money on bringing quality traffic to you site through a swish search engine marketing strategy. You’ve A/B tested your landing pages every which way, and believe they’re converting as well as they possibly can.

Yet despite your efforts you’re still seeing a depressing number of abandoned shopping carts.

You tweak the checkout process, test different form label alignments and try giving greater visually prominence to the primary action button in the hope that you can guide more people to complete their transactions.

But still, abandoned carts stay at the same level. Arrrgh, what could it be?

Have you thought about trust?

Trust plays a huge part in decisions we make about parting with our hard earned cash. Ask yourself, would you take a store credit from a shop you think will be up against the wall in a few months? Would you put an book on order from Borders without knowing when you’ll be able to pick it up?

Similar questions apply to decisions we make about online transactions. In an online checkout processes people are looking for satisfaction questions of trust. In fact, their actively looking for reasons not to trust you. How much will it cost to ship this? Will it arrive before Saturday? What’s the return policy? Why am I being asked what newspapers I buy?

In your design you have to satisfy these questions of trust. You have to make the answers visible, viable and ultimately reassuring to the users conscience.

If you’ve found your business in a situation similar to the one I’ve just described, step away from the analytics and multi-variate testing and start looking at trust. Do some user research on your customers tone of voice, start looking at what their attitudes towards your site are. Take that email marketing list you’ve been building and send out a questionnaire to uncover some of these things, then you’ll at least know where to start.

You never know, it may find it only takes one line of microcopy, on what you’ll do with a user’s card details, to turn your fourtune’s around.