Seeking all marketing experts .... does it make a difference whether a website proudly displays icons for Mastercard, Visa, etc., in terms of sales?

All I have on our site now is the digital security badge.

Should I post the major card carriers logos or other important icons?

Thanks!
Michelle

Good question, wish I could answer it definitively from fact.

My guess is that the credit card companies would make you believe that it does increase sales, but I can't say I buy that, all though we display the card logos on our site. We display them more for the customer to not have any doubt about which cards we accept, but to me as a shopper, I just assume that an eccomerce site would accept all major cards. How else are you going to pay for an item on a site?

Most of our revenue is business to business rather than consumer. In addition to accepting credit cards, we accept checks, allow people to pick up their orders at our store location and pay at that time, or use their House Charge. We recently added the credit card logos with the rationale that shoppers might have come to expect to see those logos on sites and its possible that nowadays if you DON'T have them, they might go 'hmmmm....' When I shop, I admit its nice to glance the logos and see that they do accept my AMEX before taking time to shop and put stuff in my cart. I DO expect sites to take all major credit cards but sometimes you run across the odd one that doesn't. But that's just my habits as a shopper, I'm no marketing expert.

Speaking from personal experience, I can't tell you how many times I've chosen a store becaue they list alternative payment methods like paypal or google checkout prominently. I think that you would benefit from displaying credit cards like Discover or American Express, but I think people generally expect Visa and MC to be available payment methods.

Overall, if you think that displaying these logos in any way increases consumer confidence then go ahead and advertise it.

Yes like Andy posted, it cant hurt and it lets the customer know up front what to take or you dont take, rather than once they are in checkout.

It also may make a site look more professional as I have been to some that ONLY take paypal and that kept me from buying from them. Doesn't mean they were a bad site or is paypal it just stopped be because I dont use paypal and I dont ebay etc either, so I went to another site.

Dave