One critical factor in determining if anyone will buy products and services from your online business is if there is a comfortable level of trust. Without maintaining this comfortable level of trust, your online business will not last long. Here are some points to consider when relaying the message of online business trust to your customers:

Get an email address that has your own domain. There are several services where you can get a free e-mail address. Online business customers might be suspicious as this type of e-mail address is hard to trace back to a person. If you have a registered domain name and business web hosting account, you are usually offered a predetermined number of email addresses you can use. Plus, trust is built because someone can do a whois lookup do get information concerning the domain of your online business.

Do not display testimonials or use a client’s name without permission. Any online business can post a testimonial about its own site and no one can ever verify the validity of the testimonials. And even if you post actual testimonials, never use a person’s name without express written permission because this violates their privacy and you could lose a customer.

Only offer further information if a client requests it and make it easy for them to cancel it. A trustworthy online business will ask a customer if they would like a newsletter or product updates in the future. And, if the customer decides in the future that they no longer want the information then there should be an easy way to cancel further sending of information (usually through a website link and cancellation script).

Keep communications professional. People are uncomfortable sharing personal information on the internet. When you, as an online business owner, share your personal information with your customers you might make them just as uneasy. Keep communications within the context of your online business at a professional level.

Don’t say “we” when you should say “I”. Many starting out with an online business have this bad habit of using the word “we” in their web copywriting and communications when they really should be using the word “I.” This is because in actuality they are a one-person operation but don’t want to let people know that. These same online business enterprisers feel like they have to give customers more confidence by presenting the image that there are many working for their company. This is not being truthful and you may have a customer who passes around a bad reputation about your online business if this fact is discovered.

Your online business website should have a business domain name. In other words, it should have the type of domain name that one would register and pay $35.00 USD per year to maintain. This type of online business domain name takes the form of www.yourbusiness.com and not http://69.01.54.255/index.html. Those who run the dangerous phishing scams on the internet use domain names that are not bona fide registered domains.

Is your product or service one that has a bad reputation on the internet? There are certain types of enterprises in the online business world that just raise suspicion because of the very nature of their business model. For example, you may have a perfectly valid multilevel marketing online business but there have typically been too many others who have earned a bad reputation because they did not deliver on what they promised. It might even be prudent not to even choose to go into an online business where others have spoiled the reputation of the overall business model. Want to find out if the online business you are going into is typically associated with a scam? Go to a search engine such as Google and type in the online business category and the word “scam.” The results should be very revealing.