Let me help you build customer trust and increase visitors to your website! Security providers have a common goal: to increase your website’s conversion rate. Each of these third-party verification service providers has its own area of ​​expertise and has established its own reputation. TRUSTe is known for its privacy seals and McAfee is known for its security in PCI scanning. On the other hand, Trust Guard specializes in multiple PCI scan and trust seal packages. However, they are all different in terms of requirements, methods, services, and prices.

So I took a look at these three trust seal providers and these are the standards I looked at for comparison:

1. Reputation

2. Service vs. Prices

CONFIDENCE is the leading provider of privacy seals and trust marks since its inception in 1997. With 12 years in the industry, its services have been used by companies such as eBay and IBM and it has certified more than 2,000 websites.

They are aligned to help companies of all sizes build customer trust through privacy policies with guaranteed assistance in resolving complaints about the collection of private customer information.

Services and prices:

1. Basic privacy policy (no seal): from $ 249 / year

2. TRUSTe Privacy Policy – Starting at $ 49 / month

3. TRUSTe privacy plus (TRUSTe certified web privacy seal): Starting at $ 949 / year

McAfee Secure (formerly hacker safe) protects world-class infrastructures like Toshiba, American Red Cross, Shop NBC, etc. They provide daily vulnerability scans and alert McAfee customers to vulnerabilities that could affect their network. They analyze your website and make sure it is safe from hackers.

More than 80,000 websites are trusted by the McAfee Secure brand and are guaranteed to increase the conversion of visitors to buyers. McAfee Secure, as a provider of PCI Scan, is trusted by organizations around the world to assist in their PCI certification.

Services and prices:

1. McAfee Secure Trusted Brand: $ 859.00 per year + $ 100.00 setup fee

2. Full service without trusted brand (for merchants level 2-4, quarterly and unlimited manual scans, unlimited phone support, vulnerability correction support from certified security specialists and assistance in PCI security policy and self-assessment questionnaire in line) – $ 319.00 / year

Trust Guard is a division of Global Marketing Strategies, an SEO and e-commerce company with 11 years of sales and online marketing experience. Trust Guard  is known for providing 3 types of trust seals: Security Seals, Business Seals, and Privacy Seals. All of them aim to protect website data, build credibility and increase sales.

Services and prices:

1. Verified Security Seal – $ 197 / year

2. Verified Trade Seal – $ 197 / year

3. Verified Privacy Seal – $ 197 / year

4. Multi-stamp package with daily PCI scan – $ 697 / year

5. Multi-stamp package with quarterly PCI scan: $ 597 / year

6. PCI scanning for only $ 297 / year

Get a form of visible proof that you are trustworthy, even more so if you are an online merchant just starting to build a reputable name. When choosing which seal of trust to obtain, it would be helpful to first take note of the trustworthiness of the mark. Among the three brands I’ve mentioned, they all appear to be market leaders in their stamp verification specialty, and each has more than a decade of experience. Many websites and organizations can even attest to the quality of the services they provide. Therefore, I can say that they are all reputable brands in their own right.

However, let’s go further to the deciding factor: affordability! TRUSTe offers nothing less than privacy seals and their costs are even higher than Trust Guard. You can save hundreds of dollars on Trust Guard, plus you can combine PCI scanning with a privacy seal, a combination that will also cost less than TRUSTe’s only privacy seal.

When it comes to vulnerability scanning and PCI certification, McAfee costs more than Trust Guard at less than a hundred dollars; however, if you want to combine PCI scanning with a trust seal, you can definitely save more with Trust Guard at half the cost.

Invest in trusted stamps, but don’t get one instantly just for the sake of it. As an entrepreneur, you must ensure the balance between productivity and profitability. My latest take on this is getting the brand that promises what it says (look for money-back guarantees as well) but at the same time making sure it’s reasonably priced.