FAQ
The VeriSign Secured Seal is a trust mark available for display on any Web site that protects its customers' confidential information using VeriSign services. Specifically designed and tested for its communication value, the VeriSign Secured Seal indicates to online shoppers and other site visitors that your organization has chosen the very best SSL and/or payment processing solution to help protect their credit cards and other confidential information.
Be sure to display the VeriSign Secured Seal and let your visitors know they're guarded by VeriSign's expert solutions.
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With the recent surge in phishing, identity theft, and other online scams, the VeriSign Secured Seal is an indispensable tool in your effort to improve your customers' perception of safety when they do business online. 85% of Americans are concerned that they may be one of the victims of identity theft, with 37% believing that online purchasing poses the greatest risk. 56% of Americans report they are protecting themselves from identity theft specifically by limiting their purchasing to "reputable" Web sites (InsightExpress, June 2004).
The VeriSign Secured Seal, included with every VeriSign SSL Certificate and every VeriSign payment service, is one of the most recognized trust marks on the Internet. Displaying the seal on your Web site reassures visitors and can lead to increased visitor-to-sales conversions, lower shopping cart abandonment, and a larger average purchase price.
All you need to do is copy and paste a small line of code to your home page and any other page on your Web site where you want to display the VeriSign Secured Seal. When visitors click on this seal, they instantly view a VeriSign-generated pop-up window containing information about your VeriSign services, assuring them that transactions with your site are protected.
The VeriSign Secured Seal is available free of charge for any Web site protected by a VeriSign SSL Certificate. All SSL Certificates included in VeriSign's SSL Certificates and Managed PKI for SSL product lines enable the display of the VeriSign Secured Seal. Additionally, established use of Payflow Pro, Payflow Link, or VeriSign Fraud Protection Services entitles a site to display the VeriSign Secured Seal.
The VeriSign Secured Seal is the latest and most advanced in VeriSign's long history of providing its customers with well-recognized trust marks to inform people online that the sites they visit are protected.
The VeriSign Secured Seal offers a new design. This design has been extensively tested with a broad sample of online shoppers worldwide and demonstrated to communicate safety and security more effectively than any other popular online trust mark. Comparing this seal against the eleven other most popular online marks, the VeriSign Secured Seal ranked highest by a wide margin in perceived safety of visitors' information, perceived trustworthiness, purchase likelihood, and overall preference. Test subjects also ranked VeriSign as the most recognized of the tested marks.
Clicking on the VeriSign Secured Seal displays a dynamically generated pop-up window describing the VeriSign services you have implemented to secure your customers' online experience. That way you'll get credit for the full range of VeriSign security services you employ on your site.
In addition to the United States, the VeriSign Secured Seal is available worldwide through VeriSign or your region's authorized VeriSign reseller. The seal is available to all VeriSign SSL and payment services customers.
Today any site employing a VeriSign SSL Certificate, including VeriSign's Secure Site, Commerce Site, and Managed PKI for SSL services can display a VeriSign Secured Seal. Additionally, VeriSign has extended a special pilot program to some of its Payflow Pro, Payflow Link, and VeriSign Fraud Protection customers. These customers also are able to post the VeriSign Secured Seal on their sites, and they have been directly informed by VeriSign. If this pilot program is successful, VeriSign may extend this program to more or all of its payment customers. Interested VeriSign payment customers should watch for further communications from VeriSign.
After extensive market testing using almost one thousand subjects across four continents, VeriSign determined that online shoppers prefer a clean, simple seal design with maximum recognition. Therefore the company shifted the date and time and SSL customers' organization names onto the seal's verification page.
The VeriSign Secured Seal uses JavaScript and can be served from VeriSign with or without Flash content. The Flash content provides animation and is preferred by the majority of VeriSign customers. However, if your Web site does not support Flash content, VeriSign provides a non-Flash version of the seal as well. Please refer to the installation instructions for further details.
You can insert and display the VeriSign Secured Seal on any Web page within the domain for which you employ VeriSign's SSL or payment processing services. Insert the VeriSign Secured Seal within your Web site wherever you want your site visitors to be aware of your site's authenticity and security. We recommend displaying the VeriSign Secured Seal in several places on your Web site.
To achieve best results you should place the VeriSign Secured Seal above the fold so that site visitors can see it without scrolling. Place the seal in proximity to Checkout buttons and other locations that will associate it with the appropriate functions on your site.
In addition to providing a choice between Flash and non-Flash formats, VeriSign also offers the seal in three sizes and two background types.
Most Web sites prefer the Flash version of the seal for its increased recognition factor and its overall contribution to creating a high-end experience on the site. Unless your site does not support Flash content, we recommend this version.
The transparent background achieves the best results for most sites. Sites with dark backgrounds typically work better with the white background because the detail of the mark is more clearly visible.
The most popular seal size is the medium level version. The large seal will give you the greatest visibility for the VeriSign Secured Seal, and we recommend it in cases where the Web site's design supports it. If screen space is extremely tight on your site, the smallest size may work best. There is no need to worry about bandwidth consumption when considering which size to serve. VeriSign serves up the seal directly so that you don't have to.
When you purchase a Secure Site or Commerce Site solution, within 24 hours after your certificate is issued, instructions for installing the Secured Seal on your Web site will be automatically sent to the technical contact e-mail address provided during the SSL Certificate or payment service enrollment process.
Additionally, Payflow and VeriSign Fraud Protection customers are required to establish appropriate use of their account before seal display is approved. When your account is approved for seal display, you will be informed by e-mail.
In order to maximize recognition potential for the VeriSign Secured Seal (and consequently its value to you when you display it), all worldwide versions of this seal contain the phrase VeriSign Secured in English. Each seal also contains a message to click on the seal for verification. (This term is verify in English.) This message is available in thirteen different languages. If you prefer to display this message in a different language that you use today, you must download and install that version of the VeriSign Secured Seal. <link to appropriate page>
The reason VeriSign does not offer a transparent background GIF version of the VeriSign Secured Seal has to do with a graphic technique called dithering.
Dithering is the method by which graphic artists draw curved lines in pixilated formats such as GIF images. The nature of computer graphic images is that the pixels occur in rows and columns. As a result, curved lines such as those on the VeriSign Secured Seal can have a jagged quality if done incorrectly. We all have seen these images on the Web. Dithering gets around that problem by using "halfway" colors in those pixels that ideally would contain part but not all of the curved line. Even though they are pixels of a different color, your brain smoothes them out in your perception, seeing a single curved line where in reality there are many different pixels.
These schemes can get quite sophisticated and can use a variety of colors to better smooth the perceived line. Unfortunately, this technique requires a known line color and a different known background color. In the case of a transparent background GIF image, the background color could be anything at all. Therefore a dithered image based on a background of, let's say, white (as the white background image is), will look terrible on a background of any color except white. With millions of potential background colors to choose from and an infinite number of background patterns, it is impossible to provide dithered images that will account for all backgrounds.
So how does VeriSign offer a transparent Flash seal? The Flash reader includes capabilities to provide this blending on the fly based on the two colors and the shape of the curve. We take advantage of those capabilities to offer a transparent background.
The upshot of all this is that we are able to offer Flash seals with both white and transparent background and GIF seals with white backgrounds only. We hope one of those treatments is successful on your Web site.
It is important to understand that the VeriSign Secured Seal has been scientifically tested to communicate security and trust as effectively as possible. The current implementation of the VeriSign Secured Seal is demonstrated to be more effective in this mission than previous VeriSign trust marks. That means you can expect the VeriSign Secured Seal to provide the best results possible in maximizing the number of transactions taking place on your Web site. Because the newest VeriSign Secured Seal is the most effective seal in terms of aiding your Web site in achieving its intended results, VeriSign is making exclusively this newest seal available to its customer base.
Do not modify the VeriSign Secured Seal in any way. Your unique seal is a symbol of your Web site's authenticity and security, and any change to it diminishes its value.
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