| E-commerce or the use of the Internet for sales of goods and services is an established medium for consumer purchases. As the consumer is not present during the transaction, E-commerce requires the exchange of electronic information such as shipping and financial information in order to support the transaction. The information provided by the consumer together with other information collected during the transaction may be used by the retailer for marketing purposes or sold to other companies. An expectation about how this information is used and managed is published in the form of a privacy policy on the E-commerce website. In addition to expectations set within the privacy policy, the consumer may also have expectations in regards to the E-commerce retailer's ability to deliver the goods and services as well as how information collected during the transaction will be used. This research study investigated the relationship between trust developed with the consumer, privacy concerns of the consumer, and the privacy assurances offered by the E-commerce site. Trust developed between the consumer and the E-commerce retailer as well as the consumer privacy expectations and the perceptions generated during the transaction is complex. Findings indicate that the consumer develops trust with the E-commerce retailer as a result of meeting the expectations set with the privacy policy. The original research, conducted in a university setting using a fictitious travel company, identified that trust was highly correlated with the expectations of the consumer and the privacy policy. This research study identified moderate relationships between certain facets of the Information Privacy Concerns (IPC) and consumer trust; however, the research failed to reproduce the original findings in their entirety. Differences in the findings may be attributable to the presence of very sensitive data types used in the original travel retail website versus a general E-commerce environment as used for this study. Other factors, such as the presence of risk and survey frame differences may have contributed to the lower association scores. |
