Research on Initial Trust Model for Online Agricultural Product Consumers

Abstract

Since the quality and safety issues emerged frequently in the agricultural products in China in recent years, the consumers lost their trust in the agricultural products and aroused a panic of purchasing these products. In the virtual environment of e-commerce, the consumers lose their perception of quality and safety assurances of agricultural products, which increase the uncertainty and risk factor of the transactions. From the four perspectives of consumer characteristics, merchant characteristics, service characteristics and environment characteristics, an influence model for online agricultural product consumers' initial trust is constructed, and the influences of trust propensity, merchant reputation, information quality and structural assurance on online agricultural product consumers' initial trust are tested. The results show that merchant reputation, information quality and structural assurance significantly influence online agricultural product consumers' initial trust. Information quality is the best important influencing factor for online agricultural product consumers' initial trust, and trust propensity has an insignificant influence on consumers' initial trust.