Exploring "Soft" Trust in mCommerce Activities: An Exploratory Diary and Interview Study

Trust has been a longtime concern for people when deciding whether or not to engage in online shopping. This has resulted in a variety of studies on trust and eCommerce. Recently, there has been widespread growth of mobile shopping and buying, termed mCommerce. With this comes a need to understand if and how trust issues manifest themselves in mCommerce activities and how to design for trustful mobile transactions. To address this, we conducted a diary and interview study with mobile device users to explore their mobile shopping activities and the ways in which they managed and viewed trust. Our results describe a variety of usage patterns including spontaneous purchasing and routine shopping where people gravitate to their mobile device even if a computer is nearby. Participants generally faced little issues with trust because they had very limited access to unknown companies and app marketplaces or non-virtual friends offered a form of brand protection. Users also repeatedly trusted well-known companies, citing perceived brand reputation as the sole trust anchor. Author