Trustmarks don’t increase confidence, but LV use a fake Verisign image
Recent conversations on the web have indicated that trustmarks don’t work (see eConsultancy reports on the subject here).
LV seem to have taken this one step further, though: in their Life Insurance quote journey, the (usually clickable) image to verify the presence of a Verisign seal has simply been embedded using normal HTML. If you click it, nothing happens…
Click to enlarge
See for yourself here: link
Shocking! 
George
George Rosier runs this blog. It's somewhere he can vent his spleen about web design, usability, SEO, and other such nonsense that will no doubt mean nothing in 5 years' time.
Heh, that is sneaky of LV, so I reported them to VeriSign.
I never trust those “trustmarks” anyway, how do I know which ones are trust worthy?
@C Kent
Well this is the issue: eConsultancy have run a bunch of articles debating whether trustmarks are actually any use whatsoever – and the consensus was ‘No: better design helps confidence in online shopping’.
It’s an interesting subject (for me, anyway!), since in my last job role we were adamant that a trustmark was essential in our e-commerce journey…
I work for VeriSign and want to report that this VeriSign trust mark is actually not fake. Our customers have the option of embedding animated logos or simple images, and for whatever reason LV has opted for the latter.
As for the greater issue about trust marks, studies have shown that consumers look for many different things before they make a purchase — some concentrate on the ssl padlock or green url bar, some concentrate on trust marks. It’s a shame that trust marks are receiving less than enthusiastic comments, because the best trust marks really do validate website identities and some, like VeriSign’s new VeriSign Trust Seal, actually scan sites for malware on a continuous basis. I think it really comes down to where your trust seal or mark comes from, because not all are equal.
Hi Joseph, thanks for commenting. It’s good to know that the trustmark is real, although why LV have chosen to embed it in such a way that makes it unclickable/unverifiable seems counter-productive: surely the point of the trustmark is to instil trust – the image itself even says ‘verify’, inviting the user to click – and yet it doesn’t.
I appreciate that, in secure/SSL e-commerce journeys, there’re often technical challenges that mean the host site can’t (for whatever reason) embed JavaScript or similar – but in this case, surely a different VeriSign image would’ve been a better choice?
Thanks again for taking the time to comment though: always good to see companies engaging in debate.