Vietnamese Consumers’ Intention To Online Shopping Adoption: The Role Of Trust

The primary purpose of this study was to integrate and develop a more comprehensivemodel of trust and its affect to Vietnamese consumers’ intention to adopt and useonline shopping. This study integrated Technology Acceptance Model (TAM)(Davis1989), trust in online shopping as well as social norms theory to examine consumers’trust to their intention to use online shopping through three aspects of trust:technology beliefs, trusting beliefs and social beliefs.Standing on literature, based on TAM, it is proposed that the prominent beliefs ontechnological system influence attitudes which in turn affect intention and thengenerate actual behavior to use a technological innovation. It is proclaimed that users’behavioral intention to use a technological innovation is determined by twotechnological beliefs in TAM: perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use(PEOU). Then, based on consumers’ trust in online shopping theory (trusting beliefs),customers’ trust refers reliability and trustworthiness of the e-vendors providingproducts or services. It is proposed that three most frequently characteristics of anonline vendor that is a series of specific beliefs mentioned repeatedly in the literature:belief of ability, belief of benevolence, and belief of integrity (May et al.1995). Last,based on social beliefs theory, it can be seen that social norms (typicallized bysubjective norms) intensively influence an individual behavioral intention. It isproposed that users’ behavioral intention to adopt and use technological innovation(online shopping) is also affected by a social system through the role of social norms.Hence, to develop the comprehensive of the model of consumers’ trust and theirintention to adopt and use online shopping as a shopping medium, the proposed modelof trust was explored and tested in three studies.First study explored and integrated aspects of consumers’ trust towards onlineshopping. The results of qualitative research suggested the overall model ofconsumers’ trust and demonstrated the formation of trust basing on three perspectives:technology beliefs, trusting beliefs and social beliefs. Particularly, the results of this study suggested that the integration of consumers’ trust model is very necessary forpredicting and explaining Vietnamese consumers’ intention to adopt and use online asa shopping channel.Second study tested the measurement scale and integrated model of consumers’ trustand their intention to use online shopping. The results of using Amos20.0softwarefor analyzing data collected via597Vietnamese online shoppers supported the overallmodel and revealed several significant paths. The result of this study indicates that69.6%variance of consumers’ intention to use online shopping is explained bytechnology beliefs, trusting beliefs and subjective norm beliefs among which,technology beliefs (typically is perceived usefulness) is the strongest influencingfactor and is followed by trusting beliefs (typically is integrity of online vendor).Notably, this study also admits the role of subjective norm beliefs and their impact onVietnamese consumers’ intention to shop online.Third study tested the moderating effects of website types and experience level in therelationships between consumers’ trust and their intention to adopt and use onlineshopping. The results supported the proposed model and demonstrated that websitetypes as well as experience level have moderating effects in the relationships betweentechnology beliefs, trusting beliefs as well as social beliefs (that is, website types andexperience level differences affect to shape consumers’ trust in online shopping whichin turn, affect their intention to buy via the Internet).The contribution of this study is twofold. First, it integrates and develops a morecomprehensive model of consumers’ trust and its role towards consumers’ intention toadopt and use online shopping. Second, it empirically tests the model in Vietnamwhere consumers’ trust in E-commerce has still been tenuous due to online shoppinghas been in its rag and spontaneous development by individuals without a closelegislative control causing risks for online consumers doing transactions in this market.Results of all the three studies supported the overall model of consumers’ trust and its role towards consumers’ intention to use online shopping as a shopping medium. Thefindings of this study are noteworthy for both researchers and practitioners because ofits contribution to theoretical and empirical perspectives.