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Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

In extensive conversion testing we've found that the BBB symbol is the MOST beneficial trust-symbol to incorporate into your website.

This data is across multiple markets / products and joining the BBB is one of the things that we recommend early on to conversion clients.

Consumers trust the brand immensely which is sad given the BBB's "protection money" business model.

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I must be an oddball along with everybody I know. The BBB symbol has meant nothing to me and usually rely on other sources to make a decision wether a business is trustworthy or not. IMHO BBB is pretty much irrelevant to the internet generation.

They have a good reputation but it's utterly undeserved. Some of the biggest and longest running scams I've seen display prominent BBB logos.

Interesting. I consider the BBB to be an utterly useless organization. Seeing their logo is actually slightly off-putting to me, and if I see it on a site I usually pause to ensure the site is not some tiny operation that is going to be unable to deliver. I don't easily recall ever seeing the BBB logo associated with what I consider a 'real' company online.

HP has it plastered all over their webstore. I know this because I remember thinking, "Seriously, that's the most important gif you could put there?".

That's funny, we threw it out because it had no effect on conversion and wasn't worth the money. The only logo that seemed to have a solid impact was the hacker safe logo, which we kept.

Does the hold true outside of the US? As a Canadian I'm not sure I've ever seen the BBB symbol. Maybe I'm just too young though.

In Canada the BBB logo is often displayed on the biggest rip-off services available.

I'm not kidding. Over time I've learned that when I see the BBB logo I need to be really careful, because scuzzy businesses use it as a cloak. A good example is the "Vancouver Rental Guide" ("Edmonton Rental Guide", etc) which literally sells you the information from craigslist. They cite their BBB credentials over and over to get you to fall for their scam.

You are totally correct, although it depends wildly on who your customer is (IE older people grew up trusting the BBB, younger folks don't care). We had an internal argument about whether doing this was the right thing or not for our business. I did it against the wishes of some other FeeFighters because I believe it's the right thing to do (I HATE scams like these so much), but it did mean that we had to take their symbol off our site and suffer whatever consequences come with that.

When we do focus groups or usability tests with small businesses, they always look at the BBB ratings of the credit card processors on our site. However, I think with our new product Samurai (for online payments - http://samurai.feefighters.com) we'll have a more savvy crowd who doesn't care too much about the BBB.

For those of you who aren't too familiar with FeeFighters - our original product is comparison shopping for credit card processing. A good chunk of our customers are e-commerce businesses, startups, and other "sophisticated" merchants, but we also have a bunch of mom and pop shops (of every sort) who care about stuff like the BBB.

As it turns out, in the couple of months since we had to take the BBB logo off, we have seen no difference whatsoever in our conversion stats.

You should now use a (not)BBB Accredited! logo of your own design and see how it performs...

The Made to Stick (http://www.heathbrothers.com/madetostick/) authors might say that the surprise of seeing an explicit claim about NOT being accredited would make the FeeFighers site more memorable. When's the last time you saw such a claim?

And have a link to explain why.

Agreed in full - you are an exception to the rule.

We've tested across general ecommerce, direct sales sites, lead generation, etc, etc - always comes up with the win when you're testing that "trust symbol" real estate . . .

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