Research On The Establishment And Evaluation Of Consumers’ Trust In Context Of Social Commerce

As a new trend of electronic commerce, social commerce has the huge development prospect. Social commerce conbines electronic commerce with social network, and facilitates online transaction by information sharing, recommendation, evaluation and interaction based on consumers’common interest. But during social commerce transaction, consumers are not willing to share their online shopping information and the intention to use is lower than traditional electronic commerce. So improving Consumers’ trust and purchase intention has become a crucial factor in the success of social commerce. This paper focused on the establishment of consumer trust, influencing factors and results of consumer trust. Based on the perspective of empirical research, the main influencing factors of consumers’ initial trust, continuous trust and trust transfer of social commerce were studied. Based on the theoretical research, the mechanism and role of social factors for the establishment of consumer trust were studied. Based on the application research, the consumers’ trust evaluation mechanism was studied to enhance consumers’ willingness to use.For the consumers who had no experience of social commerce, perceived usefulness, perceived security control, word of mouth recommendation and trust tendency are very important factors for building up consumers’initial trust. Empirical research also showed that perceived enjoyment could improve comsumers’ intension of use, but could not improve comsumers’ trust. And the reputation of business was not an influencing factor of trust perhaps because of the continuous innovation of social commerce. For the comsumers who had experience of social commerce, the factors of perceived usefulness, degree of satisfaction and social contributes such as social interaction and social recommendation can effectively fosilitate the establishment of continuous trust of consumers. According to different forms of social commerce, trust can be transfered from electronic commerce to social commerce or from social network to social commerce. Research on trust transfer from electronic commerce to social commerce showed that:compatibility, relative advantages and result demonstrability had signigicent positive effects on the consumers’ trust and intention of use, but consumer confidence in electronic commerce does not reduce consumers’concerns about possible risks for social commerce. Research on trust transfer from social network to social commerce showed that facilitating conditions, perceived entitativity and social support are the key fators that help to improve consumers’trust.During the transaction process of social commerce, businesses sent information to potential buyers by means of cultivating a good social network reputation, and consumers made purchase decision relying on the social network reputation of their friends. Based on the signaling game theory, this paper proved the signal role of social reputation in the process of online trading. The website sellers who sell high quality goods would choose a high (but not too high) level of social reputation to obtain maximum profits, while the website sellers who sell low quality goods would choose a low level of social reputation to obtain profits by low price.The evaluation and measurement of consumer trust can help social commerce sites and businesses to understand the degree of consumer trust, and then help them to develop strategies to enhance the consumers’ willingness to use. Based on the quantitative analysis and evaluation of consumers’ trust, a qualitative research on the documents and interviews of social commerce trust was carried out, and finally twelve reflective variables that can be observed directly were found to build up a social commerce trust evaluation model. Questionnaires were handed out to collect twelve secondary indexes scores as input of BP neural network and score of trust degree as output. The experimental results showed that the model can quantitatively measure the trust degree of consumers, and it is an acceptable trust evaluation method for social commerce.