Are "trustmarks" such as McAfee Secure worth the cost?
I agree and disagree with Andreas' answer. Yes, it totally depends on your userbase.
But my grandma sure as hell doesn't care if her favourite site has been 'secured' by McAfee. She'd want to know what a coffee company has to do with her website. And as a sysadmin I also know that those certifications are bogus to a certain extent.
However, I also webmaster a site that deals with lawyers and the storage of legal documents, where they have to enter confidential information. When it comes to this, as many stamps and seals you can get that are appropriate may help your clientelle trust you. Or so we thought. In one update I forgot to re-instate the seals (we had Thawte ones) and you wanna know how much difference it made to our sales? None. Zip. Zilch. So much so that we've since gone and ditched all the seals on our site and bought $10 SSL certificates rather than the $500 ones that come with certification seals.
Here is a very relvant article about a survey conducted asking users about trust in trustmarks. They presented users with a variety of trust marks and they asked which one they trust most:
Based on that and on other survey questions, they conclude:
- Trustmarks do matter.
- Only a handful are instantly recognizable.
- If your trustmarks aren't recognizable, then you may be better without them.
The article also notes that trustmarks may not be needed if you have a brand that is already trusted. The article lists several other ways besides trustmarks help show users that they can trust your website.
Here is an article about an A/B test conducted with and without a trustmark:
In this case, the trustmark caused the page to perform worse. Possibly because users associate trust seals with payments and sales. When used in a different context, they may turn away users.
Here is another report of A/B tests of trustmarks that have mixed results:
[A/B test] including or excluding a trust seal/badge. Slideshop added a trust badge and increased sales by 15%, while ICouponBlog removed a trust badge and increased conversions. This shows there is no definite answer and you must A/B test.
So:
- Some users pay attention to trust marks and trust a website more when they recognize the seal.
- If you are going to use trust marks, only use the ones that users are likely to recognize and trust.
- Using trust marks on eCommerce sites can be a good idea
- Using trust marks on other types of websites can be a bad idea
- You should A/B test trust marks on your own website so that you know for sure whether or not they are worth it.
In my opinion you could just do a nice looking hacker secure logo and it would probably do the same exact thing. It's nothing else than an image. That is unless you really want to pay 500$ for an image.
From my own experience, I have seen many website with those kind of sticker that have easy to find and easy to correct flaw. I wouldn't be surprise if those site were as vulnerable (or even more !) as the other website.