An Analytic Network Process Model of Trust in B2C E-Commerce

Abstract

Online consumer trust in Business to Consumer (B2C) e-commerce trust has been viewed as a key differentiator that determines the success or failure of many companies conducting their business over the Internet. In order to explore the influence factor of consumer trust and their priority, and to look for the way to promote consumer trust, an Analytic Network Process (ANP) model is constructed in this paper. Based on three dimension of consumer trust, an index system is suggested. By analyzing the interaction of indicators, the ANP model can rationally calculate the weight of each indicator with Super Decisions software. From data analysis, the research comes to a conclusion that brand of the company, law and technique, scale of the company and reputation of the website have a great impact on consumer trust. And at the present stage, consumers take more attention to competence and integrity dimension than benevolence dimension. Besides, the model also shows that 360buy wins the most consumer trust compared with the other two selected B2C companies. The consistence with the reality proves that the ANP model can effectively find the priority of influence factors.