An Empirical Study On Consumer Trust in B2C ecommerce
in China
ABSTRACT
Consumer trust has been more and more recognized as an important factor for a successful e-commerce vendor. Based on the previous research, this paper developed an extended model for analyzing the main attributes of trust of the users in China. A survey regarding the trust of e-commerce users is conducted to empirically test the model. The result shows the perceived reputation and size; the level of multi-channel integration, the system assurance, consumers’ propensity to trust and experienced-based familia rity are all positively related with consumers’ trust in the vendor. The findings may provide the suggestions for the vendors to consider the trustworthy by the consumers.
KEYWORDS
E-commerce; consumer trust; China
I. INTRODUCTION
E-business (electronic commerce) is described as the process of buying, selling, transferring, or exchanging products, services, and/or information via computer networks,including the Internet. There are many advantages driving the growth of e-commerce in the recent decades. Time saving, a greater variety of choices and cheaper prices are the three main advantages. But like the traditional business, problems emerge as e-commerce becomes more popular. The consumers’ trust in e-commerce is becoming the most significant problem. One of the key factors that make an e-commerce successful is the ability to gain consumer trust.
Trust is defined as in this study as a consumer’s positive expectations regarding an e-vendor’s conduct, characterized as faith, confidence and assurance. Trust create positive feelings towards transactions with web retailers, and thus is considered as one of the major mechanisms to reduce perceptions of behavioral uncertainty related to actions of web retailers [7].This research is focused on examining the influential factors of consumer trust by empirical experimentation to provide a basis for
e-commerce vendors to improve their businesses.
II. LITERATURE REVIEW, RESEARCH MODEL AND
HYPOTHESES
Trust is an important factor in many social and economic activities. In the context of Internet business, trust is critical because of the nature and also the limitations of online business—the invisibility of the transaction process, the physical separation between buyers and sellers, the physical separation between buyers [1]. These limitations cause greater uncertainty that all consumers try to avoid when making any purchase decisions.
In prior research, Mayer [2] proposed a model incorporating both a trusting party (trustor) and a party to be trusted (trustee). They discussed the trustor’s perception about the trustees’ characteristics. Jarvenpaa [3] examined whether customers’ perceptions about the reputation and size of an Internet store affect their trust in the store and Bendoly examined th e channel integration on consumer’s loyalty to a multi-channel firm.
Some of the previous research identified and examined the trust in term of one single aspect of the trustees and trustors respectively. Our research develops a research model by involving the attributes all variables from both aspects of trustors and trustees. As shown in Figure 1, the consumer’s trust is mainly influenced by perceived reputation and size, multichannel integration, system assurance, consumer feedback mechanism, propensity to trust and experience.
A. Characteristics of trustees (e-commerce vendors)
a) Perceived reputation and size
Research in traditional industrial buyer-seller relationships revealed that buyer’s perceptions of seller’s reputation and size are the factors of trustworthiness [4].
Reputation is defined as the extent to which buyers believe a seller is professionally competent or honest and benevolent. Reputation is vulnerable because it is harder to form a reputation than to lose it [6]. For instance, due to the Sanlu milk powder event, customers showed great decrease in trust in domestic milk powder producers.
