If you own a website then having a privacy policy is critical to your business. Visitors want to know their information is protected. Here’s how a privacy policy can help you, your business and your website.

Protect Users

If you have a new website and you’re just trying to get started with selling online you can run into problems. Your visitors have no way of knowing if your site is safe or not. They might not want to buy from you if they don’t feel comfortable about your site. If you have a privacy policy your visitor might want to buy from you because they feel more comfortable dealing with you. Your privacy policy makes them feel at ease. They can read it and see how you deal with information such as credit cards, and their other personal data.

Using a privacy policy will let those new users that haven’t visited your site before feel at ease and since you probably have a lot of competition you can make more sales and keep customers coming back to your site. The policy will also make users who have bought from you in the past feel comfortable as well since they believe you’re looking out for them and their data which is important to them.

Your Website Policy

Make sure you spend quite a bit of time planning out your policy so you cover everything you need to. Don’t just throw up any od document you want to make sure it covers everything necessary. The policy needs to be easy to understand so your customers don’t have questions or concerns about anything in the document. Consider hiring a writer or someone else who is good with words to write the policy for you so you don’t miss anything. Make sure nothing is hidden the document that a user would question because this isn’t a good practice and will lead to suspicion on behalf of your customers which you definitely don’t want.

Sections

Introduction

In this section you need to tell your visitors a little about your company and what your website can offer them as a customer. Make sure this section is clear and that the reader can understand it.

What You Collect        

This is a detailed section on what types of information is collected by your website. The users of your website need to be informed of what you collect. Even if they know what is collected because they fill out forms this should still be stated in this section. Make sure they know that their IP address and other information is collected too.

 

 

How the Information is Gathered

In this section the user needs to know how you collect the information. Let them know if they need to fill out forms or if it’s automatic. The more Information your user has the better off they will be and thye will feel protected when using your website.

Method of Collection: This details the methods you use to collect the information. Is it all automated? Do the forms visitors fill in collect other information, such as the original referrer? All of these questions will help you build a detailed description of how you collect information.

Storage

In this section you can state how the information is stored and how it is used. For example the data is probably stored in a database so let them know about that. Your visitors want to know that the data is stored safely so you need to make sure they know that you’re doing this as no one wants their data stolen.

Contact

Allow your visitors to contact you if they have any questions about your privacy policy. Be sure you include email addresses as well as your physical location and telephone number.

It Pays to have a Good Privacy Policy

Your customers want to feel protected when visiting your site. In an age of hacking and stealing data your privacy policy is critical to eliminating the fears your customer shave about using your website safely and securely.