A few weeks ago I was looking for The Business of Expertise by David C. Baker. Found several websites — smaller webshops — selling it. Before buying from a business I don't know, I always check: is there a real address on the website? Legit contact details? Sometimes I even check on street view and the trade register.
In this case I found some very negative reviews on local forums for a few of the sites. And when I scroll through Instagram in the evening and get irritated by pushy ads, I sometimes visit the advertiser's website. Quite often the Trustpilot or review badges are just images. The companies aren't even listed on Trustpilot for real.
But here's the problem: I can't do this detective work every time I buy something online. Nobody can.
The Trust Stack
Rachel Botsman — one of the world's leading experts on trust — calls this the Trust Stack. She almost bought a car from someone called "Invisible Wizard" on eBay before her father stopped her. She trusted eBay as a platform. She trusted the idea of buying things online. But she didn't trust the wizard.
This is the structure of digital trust in three rungs:
Break any rung, and users fall off. It doesn't matter how good your product is if users bail at rung one. It doesn't matter how trustworthy you are as a company if your platform feels shaky.
What This Means for You
The good news for product managers and business owners: you are not an Invisible Wizard. You are building something real. But your users still need to climb all three rungs to reach you — and each rung needs to feel solid.
Rung one is often about category trust. If your users are unfamiliar or skeptical of the type of product you're building, no amount of polish on your website will help. You need to invest in education, case studies, and positioning that normalises the category first.
Rung two is about reliability and social proof. Uptime, performance, transparent communication when things go wrong, real reviews from real users. Fake Trustpilot badges are not social proof — they are a liability.
Rung three is about you: your name, your face, your address, your track record. The detective work I do before buying from an unknown webshop is work your customers are also doing — or deciding not to do, and clicking away instead.
"Trust is a confident relationship with the unknown." — Rachel Botsman
At Sourcelab we created a quick scorecard to help you see where your platform stands across all three trust dimensions. Ten questions, two minutes. Take the scorecard →
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