Principle Components of Trust in Ecommerce Platforms from the Consumer Perspective

Abstract

Improved ICT technologies have brought about massive online presence of users in the online space such as social media platforms as well as remote working tools. This has led to a massive mushrooming of online shops as they try to follow the changing behaviour of the customers. This has come about with an challenge of information overload since the customers have a myriad of alternatives at his disposal at the time of making a decision and indeed it is impractical for an average user to evaluate all the alternatives in a timely fashion, neither do some users know what to look at when evaluating an online vendor. This put the user at a risk of losing money due to potentially untrustworthy vendors masquerading as genuine shop owners online. In deed trust is a psychometric property which many at times is informed by past experience or social norms in a context aware fashion. In this study, we seek to identify the indicators of a trustworthy online vendor so the consumer can use these to estimate trustworthiness of an online vendor before committing to a purchase. We use focus group discussions and survey to uncover what majority of experienced shoppers consider before making a purchase online and share the indicators in order to help inexperienced shoppers get a footing without much exposure to risk, and also to help ecommerce platform developers and owners to align their services to the end user expectations.