Note: ActualInsights.com forwards to this post. Actual Insights was a Dutch research firm founded by Matthew Niederberger that focused on website usability testing for clients like IBM and Google Finland. It conducted studies on UX topics including trust seals and cart abandonment. Niederberger today leads the tag management agency Tagticians. The top currently active research firms focusing on ecommerce UX are Baymard Institute and Nielsen Norman Group.
Finding current data on trust badges is harder than it should be. Search the web and you'll land on articles with recent timestamps that cite 2017 roundup posts that link back to original research from 2014. That's too old to be useful, a point MarketingProfs made well when writing about the problem of undated content online.
This post cuts through it. What follows is based on Baymard Institute's most current work on payment security and trust seals, including their 2023 seal study and 2025 checkout abandonment data, plus real-world A/B test results from brands that have put trust badges to the test.
The Baymard Institute is a UX research firm based in Denmark. They've logged more than 200,000 hours of ecommerce usability testing over the past decade and a half, covering everything from checkout form design to how shoppers perceive payment security.
Their first trust seal study ran in 2013. They've repeated it seven times since, in 2015, 2016, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2023, asking the same core question each time: which badge gives people the best sense of trust when paying online?
Before getting to those results, there's a number worth sitting with. In Baymard's most recent Checkout Usability study (2025 data, 1,026 respondents), 19% of U.S. shoppers said they abandoned a checkout in the past three months specifically because they didn't trust the site with their credit card information. That's roughly one in five. And it's been consistent across every wave of Baymard's research, which means the problem isn't going away on its own.
Context matters here too: Baymard's aggregate analysis of 49 independent studies puts the overall ecommerce cart abandonment rate at 70.19%. Of all the shoppers who bail before buying, security concerns make up a solvable slice, one that trust badges are designed to directly address.
Baymard's research on why shoppers feel insecure is worth understanding before deciding which badge to display. Most online shoppers have no idea what SSL actually means or how payment encryption works. What they respond to is how secure a checkout looks. The research describes it as a gut-feeling response: if the page looks secure, shoppers feel safer. If it doesn't, they leave.
This is good news for ecommerce brands, because visual security is something you can control.
Across all seven of Baymard's surveys, the brand-recognition pattern has been completely consistent. Shoppers trust seals from names they already know. Norton has ranked first in every single study. Google and the Better Business Bureau consistently outperform lesser-known security brands like Thawte and GeoTrust, even though the underlying security certification is often equivalent.
The DigiCert example illustrates this sharply. DigiCert owns all three of those brands, Norton, Thawte, and GeoTrust, and administers the same underlying certification for each. In Baymard's testing, the Norton seal was nearly 20 times more likely to give shoppers the best sense of trust than the Thawte or GeoTrust seals. Same company, same security infrastructure, radically different results.
Third-party endorsement seals like TRUSTe also featured in Baymard's rankings, and like the BBB, they benefit from general consumer familiarity even if shoppers can't articulate exactly what the certification means.
One of the more counterintuitive findings from the 2023 study: a completely made-up "homemade" seal, no third-party issuer, just a padlock icon with a generic "Secure Checkout" label, outperformed several legitimate but lesser-known SSL seals. Any visual trust signal performs better than nothing. But brand recognition is what moves the needle most.
Baymard's research explains the psychology. Here's what happens to sales.
TrustedSite, a San Francisco-based web security company and trust seal issuer, runs a blog series called Testing Trust, in which digital marketing agencies put its trustmarks to the test for their clients and publish the results. Some numbers from those case studies:
These are case study results from a company that sells trust seals, so treat them as directional rather than definitive. Controlled A/B tests across a broader range of retailers tend to show more modest lifts. A 2024-2025 analysis of ecommerce tests found SSL-style badges driving around 1-2.5% conversion improvement, with money-back guarantee badges slightly higher at 1.5-3.5%. The smaller numbers are still meaningful at volume, and both research streams point in the same direction.
The brands that see the biggest gains tend to share a few characteristics: they're less well-known, they're selling to first-time visitors, or they're in product categories where shoppers are already wary (supplements, cosmetics, higher-ticket items, niche electronics). Established brands with household-name recognition need trust badges less, because shoppers extend credit based on familiarity alone. That said, Baymard's research is clear that even well-known brands can bleed checkout conversions from poor UX. Amazon, Walmart, and Apple have all had layout bugs that spooked shoppers at the payment step, in some cases making people suspect the page had been hacked.
Because every site is different, the only way to know which badge or combination of badges is right for your business is to A/B test it. That's not a hedge; it's what Baymard explicitly recommends, and the conversion case studies above all came from actual tests, not assumptions.
Placement matters as much as badge choice. Baymard's usability testing consistently finds that placing one or two trust indicators directly within or adjacent to the credit card fields outperforms putting them in the footer or elsewhere on the page. The badge needs to be visible at the moment of hesitation, which happens when the shopper reaches for their card.
A/B testing tells you the revenue impact. Once you have data, you can calculate whether that lift justifies the cost, since third-party trust seals typically come with certification requirements and annual fees.
The impact on your brand goes beyond the checkout page. Professional design and attention to detail are trust signals too, and they operate well before a shopper ever sees a badge. A site that looks credible earns return visitors, referrals, and the kind of organic trust that's harder to measure but compounds over time.
Trust seals are one signal in a much larger ecosystem. A padlock icon on your checkout page can nudge a hesitant shopper across the finish line. But it can't compensate for a checkout flow with too many form fields, unclear shipping costs, or a layout bug that makes the page look broken.
The full universe of trust signals for brands covers everything from professional design and third-party reviews to media coverage and social proof. Trust seals are a useful and well-researched piece of that picture. They're not a substitute for the rest of it.
Do trust badges actually increase conversions?
Yes, across both controlled research and real-world A/B tests. The size of the lift varies by brand recognition, traffic source, and product category, but the direction is consistent. Smaller or less-familiar brands tend to see larger gains; established brands see modest but still positive results.
Which trust badge is most trusted by shoppers?
According to Baymard Institute's seven rounds of survey research (most recently 2023), the Norton seal has ranked first every time. After that, well-known consumer brands like Google and the BBB consistently outperform lesser-known SSL issuers. Interestingly, a simple padlock icon with "Secure Checkout" copy outperformed several legitimate but unfamiliar branded seals.
Should big brands bother with trust badges?
Mostly, no. Large retailers with household-name recognition don't need the visual reassurance. But Baymard's research shows that even the biggest brands lose checkout conversions to layout bugs and UX friction that erodes shopper confidence. The lesson isn't "add a badge." It's "don't let your checkout page undermine the trust your brand already built."