The Ultimate Guide to Shopify Trustmarks

Note: Trustmarks.com forwards to this post.  

Trustmarks, or trust badges, are an excellent way to establish trust with Shopify store visitors before they ever make a purchase. When shopping online, people want to have confidence in the merchant they're buying from, and putting trust badges on your website helps achieve that.

Trustmarks are a visual indication that helps visitors determine which merchants are worth buying from. Trust badges may also indicate certain features about your store, such as special offers or free shipping.

For the benefit of Shopify store owners, this post will share what trustmarks are, why they matter, and some different ones you can use for your store.

What Are Trustmarks, and Why Bother Adding Them To My Shopify Store?

According to a TrustedSite survey, 62% of users state they’ve begun purchasing an item but eventually abandoned it due to security concerns. A PayPal study found that adding a simple “lock” icon to your checkout button increases conversion rates by as much as 17%.

For visitors who don't know you or have other evidence of your trustworthiness, trustmarks are an effective way to convince shoppers they can trust you with their hard-earned cash.

In summation: trust badges increase conversion rates and ultimately lead to more happy customers and money in your pocket. A win-win!

Types of Trust Badges

There are a few types of trustmarks you can use in your Shopify store, including:

1. Payment and shipping badges: Payment processing companies such as Stripe or PayPal are far more trusted by customers. You can use logos for these accepted payment partners as trustmarks.
2. SSL certification: Shopify automatically encrypts your site to protect users from cyberattacks, as these can target vulnerable information such as credit cards and other personal information. These badges simply make it clear to customers that your site is secure.
3. Security seal: Norton, SiteLock, TrustedSite and others offer security seals, so shoppers can be confident that their data is safe.

Adding Trustmarks To Your Shopify Store

There are three primary pages where you can place trust badges: 

1. Product page
2. Cart page
3. Checkout page

We’ll go over all three.

Adding Trust Badges To Your Product Page

It’s straightforward to add trustmarks to your product page. You’ll need to open up the page editor, as you would if you were altering anything about the page, and from there you can insert images. You’ll insert trust badges as image files.

You can also hard-code trustmarks onto your product page. Be sure to take a backup of your theme before playing around with the code itself! 

If you’re a merchant with hundreds or thousands of items for sale and you want to add these badges to each product, for instance, adding them manually is tedious.

Instead, edit the code for your product page to apply changes to all products (if this is what you’re going for). Here’s how you’ll do this:

Step 1: Go to Settings → Files

Step 2: Hit “Upload Files” and insert your trustmark via URL.

Step 3: Go to Online Store → Themes → Actions → Edit code

Step 4: Go to Sections → product-template.liquid

Step 5: Copy this code and replace it with your URL from step 2  → <img src="replace_this_with_URL_of_trust_badge" alt="Trust Badge"> 

Step 6: Add the above code from step 5 back into your product page exactly where you want it to appear. Read the code carefully to determine this.

Adding Trust Badges To Your Cart Page

As with the product page, you can manually enter trustmarks or you can hard-code them in.

To manually insert them, go to your cart page settings and find the option to alter images. You’ll then want to upload your trust badges. That’s it!

To hard-code them in, it’s slightly more complex, although somewhat similar to product pages. Remember to back up your theme before starting.

Follow steps 1-3 from the product page.

Step 4: Go to Templates → cart.liquid OR Sections → cart-template.liquid

Step 5: Copy this code and replace it with your URL from step 2 → <img src="replace_this_with_URL_of_trust_badge" alt="Trust Badge"> 

Step 6: Add the above code from step 5 back into your cart page exactly where you want it to appear. Read the code carefully to determine this.

Add Trust Badges To Your Checkout Page

There’s no manual way to insert these badges on the checkout page, so here’s how you can edit the code to do so:

Step 1: Go to Settings.

Step 2: Click “customize checkout”

Step 3: Click “select image” for Logo and upload your trustmark.

That’s it!

9 Awesome Trustmarks For Your Shopify Store in 2021

Now that you know what trust badges are and how to insert them, it’s time to look at some options for excellent trustmarks. This list is based on reviews, top features, and overall app store rating.

TrustedSite

Cost: free

TrustedSite is free up to 500 page views per month, and has premium offerings as well. These trustmarks include:

• Issue-Free Orders seal
• Shopper Identity Protection seal
• Trusted Reviews seal
• Data Protection seal
• Spam-Free seal

The company also guarantees that adding their seals to your site will increase buyer conversion rates, and if they don’t, the company will give you app credit. And one other bonus is that the seals can automatically translate into 31 different languages, depending on where your buyer is from. 

Trust

Cost: free

Trust offers a free version as well as a premium version. Their offerings include:

• Store contact seal
• Reviews seal
• Money-back guarantee seal
• Secure architecture seal
• SSL seal
• PCI compliance seal
• Seals are customizable in terms of display and location
• Multi-language support
• No programming required for installation

They also offer features to help you snag those 5-star reviews, including:

• Importing reviews from other sites such as eBay, Amazon, and Etsy
• Reviews generation widget on your site
• Automated emails to request reviews
• On-site widget for product rating

Trust’s starter plan is free and highly comprehensive. However, if you’re a large Shopify store, their upgrade plans may be for you. These include Bronze, Silver, and Gold, and each offers you increased page views, verification scans, review types, and more.

Vitals

Cost: $29.99 per month with a 30-day free trial

If you’re looking for more than trustmarks alone, Vitals is for you. It curates over 40 Shopify apps to help you make more sales.

Some features include:

• BOGO
• Product reviews
• Product bundles
• Volume discounts
• Visitor replays
• Recent sales notifications
• Trust seals and badges (of course!)
• Sales pop-ups
• Content protection

Pricing is one plan only that costs $29.99 per month. Vital offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, 24/7 support via chat and email, and access to all future apps the company may deploy.

Trust Hero

Cost: free

Trust Hero is a free app for trustmarks. Their offerings are pretty simple and include various icons you can add to Shopify pages to increase conversions. Features include:

• Desktop and mobile-optimized
• No coding! Simple to insert icons
• Customizable badges
• Credible badges from payment processing partners

Free Trust Badge by Shopclimb

Cost: free with upgrades

Shopclimb is interesting because it allows you to drag and drop trustmarks onto your site. This means it’s far easier to customize the exact location without having to touch the code.

Other features include:

• Add trustmarks to product pages (free), cart, home, and footer sitewide pages (paid)
• Easy to use with no coding experience required
• Customizable badges based on size, message, alignment, and more
• Scalability. Shopclimb deals with over 500,000,000 page views monthly, and they are constantly monitoring performance to ensure badges work
• 100% U.S.-based support

Shopclimb offers three plans: Basic (free), Premium ($5.99 per month), and Plus ($19.99 per month).

When upgrading, you gain access to more page views per month, the drag and drop editor, premium support, more options for badges, and more.

Ultimate Trust Badges

Cost: free

Ultimate trust badges adds badges weekly. Features include:

• Over 300 free badges
• Customizable badges, allowing you to change alignment, size, colors, message, and more.
• No-code badges. Both inserting and customizing trustmarks is intuitive.
• Add badges to cart page, site footer, product page, and any other page.
• Optimized for mobile
• Fast CDN-based performance
• Concierge setup

There are no plan upgrades for this app; it’s entirely free, and what you see is what you get.

Free Trust Badge Master

Cost: free

Essential features of Free Trust Badge Master include:

• Frequently updated library
• Over 50 trustmarks
• Over 150 payment badges
• No-code badges
• Mobile optimization
• Customizability via message, layout, color.
• Custom image upload tool

This app offers trust badges of all kinds, including shipping, payment, special offer, quality, original brand, and even more badges. Their app is 100% GDPR compliant, so you can trust that your information is safe.

Free Trust Badge Master icons work across best-selling Shopify themes, compatible with 90% of the top 50 Shopify best-selling themes. That said, make sure your theme is one of these before installing. Using a custom theme? Don’t worry: this app will adapt within 24 hours at no cost to you so you can use their badges.

FREE Ultimate Trust Badges Pro

Cost: free

The badge options are more limited with this app. If you’re looking for something free and easy but that’s relatively simple, this can work nicely for you.

This app offers free colors and dozens of payment badges in various styles. As with all the other apps, their model is a no-code one, so no developer experience is required. Their app is mobile- and tablet-responsive.

TrustBadges

Cost: $4.99 per month or $47 per year

This app works only with the checkout page and your payment system more generally; this is not for adding any other kind of badges. 

TrustBadges offers discreet security and trust icons customized to suit your potential customers and store’s theme. Once installed (yes, in a no-code fashion!), the trustmarks display on all product pages and under “Add to Cart”. 

TrustBadges costs $4.99 per month when billed monthly or $3.92 monthly when billed annually at $47 per year.

Other Trustmark Features To Consider

Now you know a ton about trust badges and which apps to consider, but here are some other factors that may be relevant to your use of these icons.

• Monochromatic or not? While many Shopify stores make all their badges one uniform set of colors, this may confuse shoppers who rely on signature colors to identify logos (say, for payment processing companies like PayPal). Consider which approach works best for you.
• Mobile. 66% of internet users shop on their mobile devices. You can’t neglect to optimize for the mobile experience! If you choose to hard-code trustmarks, make sure you view them on mobile to ensure they fit onto the page well.
• Use separate images. Combining many trustmarks into one image may be more efficient, but it works poorly on mobile.
• Don’t overload. While it may be tempting to add every single trust badge you can think of, that can become overwhelming. It's possible to use too many trust badges. Focus on the badges that are most relevant to your store and visitors, and choose accordingly. Less is more.

Conclusion

Trustmarks are an excellent way to increase conversion and have happier customers. You can use many free and paid apps that offer a wide selection of these icons for display across the pages on your Shopify store.

Given the potential value of these trustmarks to conversions, don’t hesitate to get started today.