Creating hyperlinks that boost customer trust

When I was a neophyte to e-commerce; I remember monsterwebdesign telling me that that the best place for your privacy policy to appear is above the fold. But this practice is about as backwards as your Doctor using live leaches to clean an infected wound. Sure it might get the job done; but you aren’t going to win over your customer’s trust – that’s for sure.

By the way, the reason you need to make your policies readily available, is because many customer’s just don’t trust you. Whether it’s with giving you their email address or their credit card information; you need to reassure them. The solution to this problem is not displaying a laundry list of policies above the fold – but by providing the appropriate policy only when a concern becomes relevant.

Example 1) You are selling a product that has a money back guarantee - how should you inform your customer's of your return policy?

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which looks more professional and straightforward to you?

Example 2) You want to convince your customer that they are safe from being spammed if they give you their email address:

easy

Example 3) You want to assure your customer that it is safe to pay via credit card over the computer. You need to prove to them that some computer hacker living in Norway is not going to intercept their credit card information and then sell their identity online inorder to feed a crystal meth addiction.

easy

As far as dealing with customer concerns; relevant hyperlinks are the way to go. Mark my words, this will be a textbook part of web design in ten years.