An Empirical Study in the Effect of the Experience on Consumers’ Trust in the Familiar Online Retailers

Abstract

The virtualization of the situation of online retailing makes it more easy and profitable for retailers to sell adulterated goods, make false propaganda, and make promises not to be fulfilled, and therefore the risks increase higher for online shopping than that of offline. Since the accordingly risks increase, the customers would hesitate to make an online order unless he/she realizes the risks are limited. In the situation that the trustworthy 3rd-part payment and delivery service are used, the risk depends on the honesty, integrity, benevolence and other characters of the retailers, therefore the customer’s trust on the retailers will help him/her to make the purchasing decision. While many researches have been done in online trust for unfamiliar website, for example, McKnight 2002 used the theories of structural assurance and situational normality to understand the building up of online trust, in this study, our focus is the effect of a customer’s former online shopping experience on his/her trust in the website which is familiar to him/her. We collected more than 3000 data from Chinese online customers, and verified the effect of the different experience on consumers’ trust in the online retailing website, and also the effect of the trust on purchase intent in two dimensions: repeat buy and the average amount of once purchase.