Building Trust on E-Commerce Platforms

Imagine you’ve landed on an unfamiliar e-commerce website. Perhaps you see a few items you like, add them to your cart, and have every intention of completing your order. But by the time you reach checkout, everything goes downhill. Filling out the required fields feels like writing an essay, the shipping costs are confusing and inconsistent, and you can’t find any information about the store’s return policy. Feeling overwhelmed, uncertain—and not entirely eager to part with your hard-earned cash—you close the tab and move on. Chances you trust the brand enough to give it another shot? Zero.

Trust is a valuable form of currency in the world of e-commerce. Online trust—whether it’s the customer’s perception of security, privacy, service quality, or brand reliability—is significantly associated with customer loyalty and repeat purchase intention.¹ However, this form of trust is incredibly fragile. Even minor points of friction can send shoppers running, and later email attempts to recover abandoned carts just end up in spam folders. Perceptions of risk and uncertainty, lack of brand transparency, and poor user experiences can easily erode customer confidence in online stores. And once that trust is gone, it’s tough to get back. 

For e-commerce platform owners, marketing professionals, and UX designers, building and maintaining customer trust can feel like an uphill battle. Surface-level attempts at fixes—like A/B testing button colors or flooding pages with information—overlook the deeper behavioral forces that shape how online shoppers develop and act on trust. Behind abandoned carts are moments of doubt, confusion, or worry that set off alarm bells. In this article, we’ll take a deep dive into the behavioral science of online trust, how it breaks, and how behavioral interventions like credibility cues, nudges, and friction audits can turn skeptical shoppers into confident consumers.