The Formation Mechanism Of Customer Initial Trust In Online Shopping

In the context of miline shopping,initial trust is the first phase of trust-building,and it is also the key phase for potential customers to judge and select online vendors.How to create customer trust at the initial phase and transform shop browsers into real buyers is one of the most concerned questions of online vendors.During the initial phase,potential customers have few purchase experience used for reference,and mainly use intrinsic and extrinsic cues from the information asymmetry environment to build initial trust.With the universal application of Internet,multimedia,and imaging techniques,the influence of intrinsic cues on customer trust is strengthening.The way in which customers shaping perceptions about products has changed.The initial trust building is not only based on the evaluation of extrinsic cues(e.g.price and reputation,etc.)but also based on the overall evaluation of intrinsic and extrinsic cues.Hence,the research of initial trust has entered a new stage.However,there is few empirical research conducted in the multiple-cue context.Researchers know little about how online initial trust is built by multiple cues.According to the viewpoints of form psychology,information processing psychology,and cognitive psychology,customers use self sense to selectively process the information of online products and then create abstractness concepts.Nevertheless,academia has not revealed how online customers select numerous intrinsic and extrinsic information cues to form abstract perception concepts and how to use those concepts to build initial trust.This study tries to develop two new concepts about "Intrinsic and Extrinsic Cue Consistency"(short for IECC)and "Synthetical Cues Usefulness"(short for SCU),and then explore the formation mechanism of customer online initial trust based on these two concepts.Then this study will also explore the potential reasons behind the nonlinear relationship between SCU and initial trust.The main work and research findings of this study are as the following:(1)This study has built the concept of IECC and SCU and developed the measurement scale of two concepts.Based on the Churchill’s scale development process,this study firstly identifies the implication and dimensions of IECC and SCU.Then this study uses literature review,big data capture technique,ROST text mining,and semantic network analysis to generate 92 initial measurement items for these two concepts.The 92 initial measurement items are modified based on Delphi method in order to form measurement scales.The questionnaire is designed based on such measurement scales and is used to collected data on online survey platform.The data collected for two times are used for Exploratory Factor Analysis and Confirmatory Factor Analysis respectively,in order to examine the rationality of dimension,factor structure,and model stability of measurement model of two concepts.Finally,this study finds that the concept of SCU has two dimensions:usefulness of intrinsic cues and usefulness of online review,which are measured by 9 measurement items.Meanwhile,the concept of IECC has two dimensions:consistency of product description and consistency of service promise,which are measured by 7 measurement items.The results of data analysis indicate that the measurement scales of IECC and SCU have high reliability and validity.This measurement scales can be used for future related research on IECC and SCU under online shopping context.(2)This study has explored the influence of IECC and SCU on customer’s initial trust.Meanwhile,this study adopts latent interaction models without the mean structure and uses AMOS 23.0 software to examine the moderating role of IECC,expertise,self-efficacy,and cognitive motive.The results of data analysis show that IECC and SCU have significantly positive impact on customer’s initial trust.In addition,IECC,expertise,self-efficacy,and product involvement moderate the relationship between SCU and customer’s initial trust.(3)This study also uses modified multi-group comparision principle of structural equation model to examine the interactive moderating effects of IECC and customer cognitive characteristics variables(i.e.expertise,self-efficacy,and product involvement),and further reveal the nonlinear relationship between SCU and customer’s initial trust.The findings indicate that the moderating role of IECC within the relationship between SCU and customer’s initial trust would be changed due to the differences of customer cognitive ability and cognitive motives.When customer expertise,self-efficacy or product involvement is low,IECC does not moderate the relationship between SCU and customer’s initial trust.On the contrary,when customer expertise,self-efficacy or product involvement is high,IECC positively moderates the relationship between SCU and customer’s initial trust.Based on customer cognitive characteristics and abstractness cognitive concepts,this study has offered new research perspectives for the future study in the multiple-cue context of online shopping,and it has also extended and improved current cue utilization theory and cue consistency theory,avoiding the problems of low validity when isolated examining of the influence of intrinsic cues or extrinsic cues.Furthermore,the findings of this research have certain theoretical and practical impactions for online vendors and E-commerce platform.