Research On Consumer's Web Trust And Trust Transference In Online Retailing Vendor

With the rapid development of Internet, the online B-to-C business has become the indispensable part in our daily life. This business model brings us more product choice, more convienient comparison of price and style of products, and the convieniency of indoor shopping. All of these give modern consumers great convienece because of the rapid rhythm of modern society. According to the statistic of Forrester Research Inc., the online retailing revenue will climb to USD175.3 billion which is slight lower than the USD223.6 billion sales revenue of traditional retailing in America. In the following years, the sales revenue of online retailing will increase yearly and reach USD331. 6 billion in 2010, which is exceeding the USD253 billion revenue of tradional retailing.But trust is always a bottleneck that limits the development of B2C business. The doubtness on online products and service, security, privacy and so on, make it difficult for consumers to built enough trust in those virtual companies. Many researches have proved that the trust is the necessary condition for many transactions (Dasgupta, 1988; Gambetta, 1988; Gulati, 1995; Kumar, et al., 1995), which can decrease the risk and uncertainty from the dependence on other participants in the transaction (Deutsch, 1958; Luhmann, 1979). The absence of trust in Internet environment and institution environment is possibly the big obstacle for consumers' acceptance of E-commerce (Hoffman et al., 1999; Gefen &Straub, 2002).The academic research on trust was started about a century ago. About 50 years later, Psychologists, Sociologists, and Economists began to make detailed researches on trust. But the research on online trust just begin in the late of lase century. To solve the serious online trust problems in E-commerce, many researchers have implemented kinds of reserches focus on the factors of online trust from different views. The past researches on online trust have three limitations: First, they are all focusing on one narrow area. Some are from the website design view, the others are from the E-commerce environment view, and some are from the products and service quality view, but no one comprehensive model can take in account the whole factors. Second, few of them consider the dynamics of factors of online trust, most researches are focusing on the initial online trust, but few are focusing on the experience stage of online trust. Third, they seldom consider the trust transference in online trust model. Some companies have both online business and offline business; how the offline trust affect the online trust building? Seldom of them has answered this question.This doctoral dissertation summarizes the research results in Sociology, Economics and Psychology areas, and the research results about online trust, and indicates that a comprehensive research on online trust is necessary. This dissertation proves that online trust is a necessary condition of the formation of E-Commerce transaction; fully analyzes and categorizes the factors affect the consumers' online trust, builds up a Structural Equation Model about how these factors affect online trust with the consideration of online trust dynamics, and compares the impact of factors for potential customers and experienced customers, finds up the distint factors in different trust stages. Also with the research sample of LIANHUA OK which has both online stores and offline stores , this dissertation makes an empirical research on the trust transference from offline to online, confirms the impact of trust transference in Click-and-Mortar B—to-C E-commerce model. According to the research findings, the author also gives some advice to internet retailing vendors about how to improve the web trust of their consumers.The author makes the following efforts in this dissertation:1. According to the analysis of the relationship among consumers, online vendors, suppliers, partners, investors, web assurance institutes and B2C e-commerce environment, this dissertation gives a fully on the relationships across kinds of trust, builds up a comprehensive web trust analysis framework;2. From the trust transference view, this dissertation also presents the construct of transferece trust, and ananlizes the online trust factors from two views of the consumers' evaluation on transference sources and the relationship between online store and transference sources, riches the infrequent researches in this area to some extent.3. With the comprehensive model built in this dissertation, we compare the impact of factors for potential customers and experienced customers, finds up the distint factors in different trust stages and tests the impact dynamics of transference trust both in pre-transaction stage and post-transaction stage.4. Focusing on the hot topic of Click-and-Mortar B-to-C E-commerce model currently, this dissertation discusses the offline trust's transference impact on online trust and gives a further empirical research to comfirm the impact.5. The findings of teoretical analysis and empirical study also give some advice to web retailing vendors about how to improve the web trust of their consumers.