An investigation of significant factors affecting consumer trust in e-commerce

The major research goal of this dissertation was to identify the important factors that significantly influence the formation of a consumer's overall trust in a website. By collecting empirical data and applying multivariate statistical analysis, this study achieved this goal.; The data for this study were collected through a web page-based survey. Principal component factor analysis was applied to obtain composite scores for some constructs measured with multiple items. Stepwise multiple linear regression analysis was employed to test the hypotheses. A total of five hypotheses with 20 factors were posited and tested in this study. Six factors were identified to have significant influence on the formation of a consumer's overall trust in a website. These significant factors were reputation, website characteristics, service quality, overall satisfaction, perceived risk, and education. This study also examined other relationships as suggested in the model of consumer trust in e-commerce and determined that trust indeed have strong impact on two major dimensions of customer loyalty, purchase intention and likelihood of recommendation.