The Main Influencing Factors of Customer Trust in China’s Import Cross-Border E- commerce Business Model

Abstract: China’s import cross-border e-commerce (CICBEC) business model differs from other online shopping business models in both the participators and transaction processes. Government as an important participator has greatly promoted the healthy and rapid development of this business model. As a vital topic in all kinds of businesses, customer trust is also a core research topic in online shopping. Many scholars have studied customer trust in traditional online shopping while few of them focused on cross-border online shopping, let alone the CICBEC business model. The government is a new participator, whose contribution on customer trust is not clear. Also, other known variables’ influences on customer trust are still worthy of discussion. This research aims to address existing research gap by contributing to Lee and Turban (2001)’s Customer Trust in Internet Shopping (CTIS) Model and constructing a new customer trust model. A number of influencing factors of customer trust were defined and tested in this research. It shows that influencing factors from four participators, the e-retailers, e- commerce platforms, government and third-parties, have a significant correlation with customer trust. The final results show that order fulfillment, government actions, e-retailer reputation, information quality, e-commerce platform security and e-commerce platform reputation have significant influences on customer trust.