I just read a post called ‘Trust is the new vertical search‘ on SearchAnyway. The topic was a new venture called WeTrust, which is, in their words, “a safe shopping search and directory for web sites that have secure shopping facilities.”

1. Your site must have a secure server with valid digital certificate so it can encrypt all customer personal information, including credit card information.

   By having a secure server, your site will be using technologies such as SSL (Secure Socket Layer) or SET (Secure Electronic Transmission) ensuring that sensitive information such as personal details passed between your customer’s computer and your computer cannot be read by a third party.

   Visitors to your site should be able to see that this technology is in place by seeing the locked padlock when reaching the order page, as illustrated below:

   

2. Visitors should be able to see “https” at the start of the address bar on their browser when completing your order form page. The "s" in "https" stands for secure.

So basically, if you’ve got a valid Thawte certificate or equivalent, and pay them £99 a year, you can be on this directory. I was moved to leave the following comment:

While I applaud the idea of pre-vetted shopping sites that are trustworthy, it seems to me that having a secure server with a valid digital certificate is a pretty minor requirement. Just because data is safe while in transit doesn’t mean that a site won’t then do something unscrupulous with it.

I think your post brings a bigger issue to light, though. I love the title ‘Trust is the new vertical search’. Wouldn’t it also be fair to take that a step further? Something like, ‘Trust is the new e-currency’? People are fearful of Google’s personalization efforts, they’re worried that they’re getting biased info on Wikipedia, and you just can’t find a good deposed Nigerian ambassador to invest in anymore. Trust is worth more than gold online these days. In fact, I’m going to write a post about this… I think it’s that important!

So here I am… living up to my word by writing this post. And I do think it’s important, so I’m going to say it again, in bold:

In a world with few boundaries, trust is the only currency worth having.

Why is trust so important? Other than the obvious, feel-good, look-I’ll-count-to-three-then-fall-back-and-you-catch-me sort of team-building aspect of it?

Because trust is not a touchy-feely, airy-fairy commodity. Trust is what drives the world economy, and without it, our entire financial system would collapse.

I’ve been reading a lot about the demise of various financial institutions thanks to Marc Andreessen’s accessible commentary; we’ve had five investment companies go under in the past three months here in New Zealand. Yes, many poor decisions were made. Yes, the economics of it didn’t work. Yes, the people who ran the funds really screwed things up. But the only reason these funds were able to operate in the first place was because people trusted them, and the reason they are going under now is because people don’t trust them.

Trust me (hah!)—if every American went to the ATM right now and withdrew their money, the banks would collapse, followed closely by everyone else. Trust is the lifeblood of any economic system.

I had the interesting experience as a child of visiting Argentina several years in a row during one of their hyperinflationary runs. The first year I went, the exchange rate was 14 Australes to the US dollar. The second year, it was 1,400. The third year, 2,500, and the fourth year it hit 10,000 and they changed to the peso.

Living in an economy where there’s no trust in the currency is a different way of life. There were no price tags on anything in the shop—there were codes, and the shop assistant looked up your item on an intricate matrix that included the most up-to-the-minute exchange rate. As soon as you made a purchase, the shop would close so the attendant could run to the bank and exchange the cash for dollars; if they waited until the end of the day, they could lose 30%.

So the economy is one thing that’s utterly dependent on a bedrock of trust. Online, though, you could say that your wealth is defined by the trust you engender.

If you want to sell something on eBay, you better have a trustworthy profile. If you want to be a power user on Digg, you have to build up trust. If you want to have a blog that people care about (I do, I do!), then you have to earn people’s trust and keep earning it.

If someone said to me, “Look, I’ve got a blog and a bunch of money,” that wouldn’t be very interesting. But if someone said, “Look, I’ve got a blog and 50,000 loyal visitors who trust what I say,” then I would perk right up. Online, it doesn’t matter where you are, what kind of accent you have, whether you’re male or female, or how much money you’ve got in the bank. What matters is how much people trust you.

Do you agree? Or do you think traffic trumps trust? And how do you decide who you’re going to trust on the Internet? I’d really like to hear from you.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 4:18 am and is filed under Privacy, People matter, Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.