Using P3P and clear privacy policies can help bolster online sales.
Are your online customers balking at providing their personal information
in order to purchase products online? The problem could be your privacy
policy.
While most organizations have a privacy policy in place stipulating how
they deal with customer data, whether they keep information private, sell it to
business partners or some combination of the two, many fail to make these
policies clear to consumers. And consumers who are unsure of how their
information is being used are less apt to make purchases online.
In fact, according to research conducted by Harris Interactive, 64% of
online consumers decide not to purchase on a site because they are
unsure of how their personal data is being used. And according to The
Customer Respect Group, an online research firm, this uncertainty is often due
to the fact that no privacy policy exists. Of the 450 sites the group researched
for its study on privacy policies, 17.7% did not even provide consumers with an
online privacy policy.
P3P can help
Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) is an emerging standard, developed
by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), that provides a simple, automated, clear
way for sites to provide their privacy policies to their online visitors.
P3P-enabled Web sites fill out a standardized multiple-choice form that details
their privacy policy. Then, that information is made available via XML to site
visitors using P3P-enabled browsers, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0,
Mozilla and Opera. The P3P-enabled browsers "read" the information and compare
it to the consumer's own set of privacy preferences. This puts privacy policies
where users can find them, in a form they can understand, and, most importantly,
gives them the confidence to make purchases online.
For more information on P3P, go here. For a
step-by-step guide on how to P3P-enable your site, go here.
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