Strategisi G Co Sumer Logistic Requireme Ts I Ecommerce Tra Sactio S: Evaluatio of Curre T Impleme Tatio S

Lack of trust has been identified as one of the reasons why many visits to eCommerce websites do not turn into proper transactions. To support trust, an information framework model based on research on eCommerce trust has been developed. The model identifies the kind of information a consumer expects to find on an eCommerce website and that is shown to increase his trust toward the online merchant. An information extraction system has been developed to help gather the required information from the websites. In this paper, we first validate the information model through a questionnaire using a consumer sample. This is then followed by an evaluation of the current implementation of eCommerce websites with regards to the developed trust information model. 1. I TRODUCTIO A D MOTIVATIO One of the areas that has been revolutionised the most by the development of the internet is business and commerce. Business transactions are no longer bound by geographical boundaries, time differences or distance barriers. This new business setting is known as eCommerce. ECommerce is the success story of the last few years. However, there are many hindrance factors which cause it to fail to reach its full potential. Han and Noh [8] found that several critical failure factors of eCommerce need to be addressed seriously by the eCommerce industry to ensure its usage will continue to grow. Their findings are mainly on the dissatisfaction of customer on the unstable eCommerce system, a low level of personal data security, inconvenience system and disappointing purchases. Other problems with eCommerce include delays in deliveries, quality of the goods and fraud. Indeed, consumers’ loss to Internet fraud has increase from US$3.2 millions in 1999 [2] to more than US$ 14.5 millions in 2002 [16] and this is increasing every year. This has affected consumers’ trust towards online business. The question that many customers are asking is “who to trust in the cyber space?” and most importantly, how to quantify trust? Many variables should be considered when attempting to quantify or just trying to understand the trust relationship between the vendor and the customer. In this paper, we present a model for eCommerce trust, its implementation and an evaluation of current eCommerce websites based on our model. The remaining of the paper is organised as follows. In section 2 we review some of the models used to evaluate trust in eCommerce and in section 3 we present our proposed trust model. In section 4 we summarise the extraction system developed to support the gathering of the various variables required by the trust model and in section 5 we present three methods for the evaluation of the trust model. We conclude and evaluate our system in section 6.