Comment by pitdesi
14 years ago
You are totally correct, although it depends wildly on who your customer is (IE older people grew up trusting the BBB, younger folks don't care). We had an internal argument about whether doing this was the right thing or not for our business. I did it against the wishes of some other FeeFighters because I believe it's the right thing to do (I HATE scams like these so much), but it did mean that we had to take their symbol off our site and suffer whatever consequences come with that.
When we do focus groups or usability tests with small businesses, they always look at the BBB ratings of the credit card processors on our site. However, I think with our new product Samurai (for online payments - http://samurai.feefighters.com) we'll have a more savvy crowd who doesn't care too much about the BBB.
For those of you who aren't too familiar with FeeFighters - our original product is comparison shopping for credit card processing. A good chunk of our customers are e-commerce businesses, startups, and other "sophisticated" merchants, but we also have a bunch of mom and pop shops (of every sort) who care about stuff like the BBB.
As it turns out, in the couple of months since we had to take the BBB logo off, we have seen no difference whatsoever in our conversion stats.
You should now use a (not)BBB Accredited! logo of your own design and see how it performs...
The Made to Stick (http://www.heathbrothers.com/madetostick/) authors might say that the surprise of seeing an explicit claim about NOT being accredited would make the FeeFighers site more memorable. When's the last time you saw such a claim?
And have a link to explain why.
Agreed in full - you are an exception to the rule.
We've tested across general ecommerce, direct sales sites, lead generation, etc, etc - always comes up with the win when you're testing that "trust symbol" real estate . . .