Trust & Privacy in e-commerce Strategies for reducing privacy concern by building trust

Management Summary Building trust online is a challenge a lot of companies face in a growing online world. Without personal interactions it is difficult to build trust and reduce privacy concerns in this online environment. This study shows that e-commerce is perceived as a personal interaction between two humans, which changes the nature of the design of the online stores. Also, there are a some concepts that help build trust online and reduce privacy concerns. This study showed that there is indeed a way for businesses to build trust with their customers online. This can either be done on social, institutional, or technical aspects of an e-commerce businesses. If businesses are able to be fair in their procedures around the use of personal information, and give users control over their information, this leads to an increased trust in the e-business. It was found that by building trust, perceived privacy concern can be reduced which helps build the relationship with a customer over time. This study tried to build a model that would help businesses and researchers to further investigate this topic and validate the proposed model.