“Unless the first impression is favorable, visitors will be out of your site before they even know that you might be offering more than your competitors,” said Dr. Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University.

A friend asked me yesterday, ‘What is important for an online store?”

Well, think about it, almost 100% of the people who visit an ecommerce store don’t know the owner. If you walk into a brick and mortar store, you can talk to the owner,  manager or a  sales clerk. At the very least if the product is defective, you can take it back to that store.

What does that say? What is the main ingredient there? Trust that the customer’s needs will be met in one way or the other.

How does it work for online stores? You can’t hold the product, you don’t see a human face and so how do you gauge the trustworthiness of a website?

Here’s where research by Dr Gitte Lindgaard and her team from Carleton University’s Human-Oriented Technology Lab in Ottawa showed us that “Visual appeal can be assessed within 50 milliseconds, suggesting that Web designers have about 50 milliseconds to make a good impression.” [Report Published in the journal Behaviour & Information Technology]

Which of these two sites appears more trustworthy to you? [Remember that your potential customers take less than a second to judge]

http://www.sierratradingpost.com/d/4287_Cycling-Gear.html

http://www.eastoncycling.com/en-us/road/

A larger majority would choose the second site.

The reason is that first impressions matter when it comes to website design. Designers have less than 1/20th of a second to influence buying decisions. With the hundreds of businesses online, if you’re not taking advantage of that 1/20th of a second, then you are losing a potential sale.