The Importance Ranking of Trust Attributes in e-Commerce Website

The process of building consumer trust in e-Commerce is based on the presence of trust features or trust attributes in the websites. Trust attributes are usually presented to the consumer by some clues on the homepage. For example, the clue ‘contact us’ will be linked to the trust attribute ‘company address’. Consumers may examine e-Commerce websites for the existence of trust attributes. However, to date, which trust attributes contribute to the website’s trustworthiness and which trust attributes give more value to consumers has not been adequately explored. Therefore, the purpose of the paper is: (1) to look for relevant trust attributes that should be placed in e-Commerce websites and (2) to identify the importance ranking of trust attributes that contribute to the trustworthiness of e-Commerce website. Five e-Commerce trust models were used for deriving the trust attributes. An online survey that received 1230 respondents was carried out to investigate the importance ranking of important trust attributes. This paper contributes to the discussion on how to build trust in e-Commerce for various stakeholders that include consumers, business organizations, system developers, and also to the researchers.