Research On E-commerce Trust Oriented To The Whole Transaction Processes

Compared with western developed coutries, China has not yet established an intact social credit system and people generally have low trust. How to establish, increase and maintain consumer trust, thus transforming potential consumers into actual consumers and further into loyal consumers is the focus of e-commerce practitioners and is also the key to make profit.E-commerce transaction processes can be divided into three phases: pre-sales, sales, and post-sales. Consumer trust dynamically develops with the proceeding of transaction process. The factors influencing consumer trust in each phase are also different. With the advancement of transaction process, main antecedents of trust will transit from website quality to third party trust mechanisms to service quality (except these three factors, there are other factors related with consumer, merchant, website and third party which also impact trust), and the trust consequences will transit from purchase intention to actual purchase to repurchase behavior. Due to the cycling of transaction processes, we can build a dynamic trust model. Moreover, the model is supported by many theories, which are coming from the disciplines of information technology, social psychology, economics and organizational behavior.Compared with traditional markets, due to the low searching cost and switching cost, online markets will have different characteristics, that is, the price level, menu cost and price dispersion of online markets will be lower than those of traditional markets. However, based on the comparative analysis of online and offline markets of two products including book and CD markets, we find that online markets even have higher price dispersion than traditional markets. One explanation for this result is the function of trust. Consumers will be willing to pay extra price for their trusted products and this leads to higher price dispersion.Establishing initial trust is the most important step during three phases. Because they have no previous direct experience with websites, consumer will rely on second-hand information such as reputation and their own perceptions to build their initial trust. Especially, website quality perception will greatly affect consumers'initial trust building. Website quality can be measured with two dimensions of TAM including perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. Thr results show that perceived usefulness, disposition to trust, perceived security and vendor reputation significantly influence consumers'initial trust in online stores, which in turn leads to their purchase intention. Disposition to trust is found to moderate the relationship between reputation and initial trust. Initial trust fully mediates the relationship between reputation and purchase intention and that between perceived security and purchase intention.The research on sales trust is mainly concerned with third-party trust mechanisms. Third-party trust mechanisms, also called as institutional trust mechanisms, will play great role in assuring the success of e-commerce transaction. The paper examines the effect of four kinds of third-party trust mechanisms on trust. The results show that escrow service, trust in the intermediary and feedback systems strongly affect consumer trust, which negatively affects perceived risk and positively affects transactional intention.Post-sales trust will determine customer retention. Service quality including on-time and accurate delivery and efficient customer support is the critical factor affecting post-sales trust. The service quality can be measured with SERVQUAL, which includes four dimensions: reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy. The results show that reliability, responsiveness and assurance can be combined into one factor named as service level. The service level, reputation and satisfaction significantly influence consumer trust, while website quality and all the dimensions of service quality have significant effect on satisfaction. Trust and satisfaction together lead to repurchase intention of consumers.Furthermore, compared with website quality, service quality has a larger effect on consumer trust, demonstrating that consumers attach great importance to service during the post-sales phase.