Consumer Trust in E-commerce

Abstract: An often mentioned reason for consumers not purchasing from Internet vendors, is the lack of trust. The lack of physical clues and physical interaction in the online environment make it more difficult to establish trust with the consumers. So, it is important for companies to learn how to manage consumers’ trust in e-commerce. Although, building consumer trust on the Internet is a challenge for online vendors. The purpose with this dissertation was to get a better understanding of consumer trust in e-commerce. We wanted to find important factors that help to establish consumer trust in e-commerce. These factors guided our empirical research, in which our purpose was to investigate how consumers perceive the importance of some selected factors, for them to feel trust to purchase online. We chose to use a survey as our research strategy and the primary data was collected through a questionnaire. We found that there are many factors that help establish trust, which are relevant for the consumers when purchasing online. Security and privacy are factors that are of great importance for the consumers to feel trust, to purchase online. Businesses are not able to directly control the trust their customers feel. They can just build environments that encourage people to feel trust. A marketplace can be trustworthy, but the participants have to feel the trust before the marketplace can be trusted.