I have no axe to grind - Trust Seals (BBB, HackerSafe, Trust-Guard) are a minuscule part of our budget and, frankly, we spend more time/money trying to figure out where to put them than on sites than we do deciding whether or not to buy them. Ditto with SSL and “site ownership” buttons. But we use them all, liberally.

Not liberally in the sense of using other people’s tax money. I mean it as ‘more-is-better’ - site seals, SSL badges, etc, etc. They’re all good, below the fold.

There is a great thread on Webmasters World right now where a guy did A/B tests and increased his conversions 97% with seals. That is a ton, and they’re paid for in a day or two in incremental business alone.

We use Trust Guard because their seals are pleasing looking and their procedures, while detailed, are un-intrusive. They also have a price advantage over their competitors - they’re about half as expensive. I believe the last set I bought from them for one project was $400 and the project before that we used HackerSafe/BBB and it was a grand.

I’d be shocked if consumers thought there was a difference.

We’re pretty old-skool and had been using Verisign SSL infrastructure since before it was Verisign. Last year one of my guys wandered up to me at lunch and suggested that our registrar, GoDaddy, was a better deal at $20/year than Verisign at $400/year. I felt pretty dumb. So we’ve switched over and we took everyone and their significant others out for a very nice dinner. (How nice? Cabs home for everyone!)

So we try to do this stuff as inexpensively, in terms of both money and time, as possible. It reassures some people, the rest ignore it, and almost nobody can tell you the difference between vendors!