American Greetings tops in online trust

Bellevue, Wash. – American Greetings is the most trusted online retailer. According to the 2015 E-Commerce Online Trust Audit and Honor Roll from The Online Trust Alliance (OTA), 2015’s top 10 most trustworthy online retailers (11 due to a scoring tie) are American Greetings, Cabela's, Drs. Foster & Smith, Fanatics, GameStop, The Honest Company, Jomashop, Kate Spade New York, LivingSocial, Netflix, and SparkFun Electronics.



For the third consecutive year, American Greetings earned the honor of most trustworthy retailer. American Greetings and Netflix are the only two holdovers from 2014’s top 10, while five of the top 10 had never qualified for OTA’s Honor Roll until this year.



In total, 212 of the 500 largest online retailers, or 42%, qualified for OTA’s Honor Roll. Despite setting the most difficult standards yet for its annual trust audit, OTA reported a 78% improvement from 2014, when only 24% of evaluated online retailers made the Honor Roll. This dramatic improvement is due to nearly 100 retailers, who fell just short of the threshold the previous year,.



Unfortunately, 45% of the 500 evaluated retailers not only didn’t qualify for the Honor Roll, but outright failed at least one component of the audit. A failure typically means the retailer is especially vulnerable to an existing online security threat, is not adequately protecting consumers from phishing and other social engineering threats, or has insufficient privacy policies and inadequate disclosures.



OTA judged each retailer in three categories: privacy (27 % fail rate), consumer protection (22 % fail rate) and security (5 % fail rate). The fail rates in all three of these categories dropped significantly from 2014 (34 %, 26 % and 11 %, respectively). Thirteen percent of retailers neither failed the audit nor scored well enough to qualify for Honor Roll status.