Understanding Consumers' Trust in Internet Financial Sales Platform: Evidence from "Yuebao"

Obtaining consumers’ trust is one of the crucial objectives of online transaction success. In the context of Internet finance, trust becomes the focus of scholars’ research in different fields. In previous studies, trust has been investigated in psychology, sociology, economics and many other disciplines. Since the Internet emerge in human’s daily life, a steam of literature shed light on consumers’ trust based on Internet. Now, Internet finance has become popular in ordinary people’s lives. So, it’s essential to understand consumers’ trust in Internet financial sales platforms. In this paper, we investigate consumers’ trust with the data collected from “Yuebao” users in China, and adopt six factors after reviewing prior related studies. The factors are clustered in two resources. Resource theory is employed to generate the proposed research model. Finally, we find that perceived ease of use, perceived benefit, perceived security control and third-party guarantees have significant effects on consumers’ trust, while perceived credibility and network size are not significant related to trust. The results of this study provide directions for system administrators and service providers to achieve higher levels of micro-blog usage by developing multi-faceted strategies to enhance users’ perceived trust toward the platforms.