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Comment by petraeus | Hacker News Reader

If you are a top 10 site you won't need an EV, but if you are in a small business in a competitive market it could help.

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> if you are in a small business in a competitive market it could help.

Sure, it "could help". But let's say there are 2 identical sites. One site upgrades from DV to EV. The other site takes the same money and invests it in a Graphics Designer to make their home page look nicer.

Which one will sell more product? I'll put my money on the nicer-looking site every time.

Depends whether the redesign was actually necessary. Websites and software UIs are often redesigned simply because the powers that be are bored with the existing design (through familiarity). The users either don't use the site enough to notice, or are annoyed with the new design because they have to re-learn how to use the software. If it is effective, an EV certificate may have a more positive impact than a redesign which just serves to provide a change of scenery for the developers/management.

Why not have both?

> If you are a top 10 site you won't need an EV, but if you are in a small business in a competitive market it could help.

This exact point is discussed and addressed in the article:

> What we're seeing here is that EVs are most frequently used by larger sites and as size declines, so does EV adoption. Now perhaps the commercial CAs are simply seeing this as a large addressable market for their product (which would bring us back to financial motives again), but clearly their view of who actually needs the cert the most is not consistent with those who are actually buying them.

Basically you're right but missing context. Small businesses for the most part are not technically oriented enough to appreciate or even know about the existence of EV certs. But I can guarantee you that through my years of working for a certificate reseller, those SMBs who adopted an EV saw a increase in conversion rate.

In this case the numbers do not tell the whole story.

That does not really address the point. The fact that smaller sites are not buying EV certs does not mean that it would not be beneficial for them to do so.

What's more likely? That EV certs have been available for a decade and would have benefited those sites, but despite that, small sites generally haven't obtained EV certs? Or that EV certs don't actually help such sites?

See also the mentions in the article of informal surveys of non-technical users, who show no apparent affinity for EV certs.

I have not seen any A/B studies of the efficacy of EV certificates in driving conversions/sales/etc.

> If you are a top 10 site you won't need an EV, but if you are in a small business in a competitive market it could help.

Random people don't know an obscure corporation any better than they know an obscure domain name. It's as possible for Foo LLC to be operated by "Satan" as foo.com.

And the people who know what an EV cert is know that. So hardly anyone will even realize that you have one, and the few people who do still won't care.

You may be right but I worked for a certificate reseller for years and those we persuaded to adopt EVs saw an increase in conversion rate, so theres that.

The question isn't whether you can statistically measure an effect, it's whether the effect is large enough to justify the effort and expense.

It would be interesting to see a real study that accounts for confounders like site improvements or new products rolled out at the same time as the new certificate.

If there was actually a large effect it might suggest that browsers UIs need to be adjusted, given how little real assurance of trustworthiness an EV certificate provides.

I am not aware of anyone at all who cares about EV. If you are a small business you should probably use the money that you would waste on EV elsewhere.

I personally care about them, I saw about a 30% increase in conversion rate once added (vs a standard Let's Encrypt DV cert). The cert paid for itself in literally less than a couple days.

Please provide a little more detail. At the moment I can only conclude that you might have some pretty sophisticated customers.

I've personally never (knowingly) seen the EV extended green bar generate any positive change in general end user buying behaviour.

Our primary customers are younger (millennial would probably be an accurate description), “tech” oriented, males.

I did say a "little more detail" and your response indicates your customers are more likely to understand the green bar thing.

I'll be willing to bet that few of them will be able to usefully debate the merits of EV over DV though 8)

However, it is a start and I'm glad it works for you. It would seem that the message is getting through a bit. I own an IT company with 20 odd employees and I estimate that roughly 50% of those staff would be unable to tell me exactly what an EV cert is for as opposed to a DV but to be fair they are all rather good at looking for the signs that a site is dodgy (or bone fide)

I agree, that's something I found strange in the original post.

Why ask something as esoteric as the differences between EV and DV certs to end users, instead of the differences (albeit cosmetic) they actually see.

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