Third-Party Assurances: The Road to Trust in Online Retailing

Consumer trust of Internet vendors is a major factor influencing the success of e-commerce. To enhance consumer trust, many e-retailers are experimenting with various trust-building strategies, including participation in third-party assurance programs. This study presents a model describing the relationship between trust and online purchasing, as well as related relationships with antecedents to both trust and purchasing: third-party assurances, individual disposition to trust, perceived risk of purchasing on-line from a particular web merchant, and attitude toward a particular web merchant. Four manipulations of a simulated retail website were used to test nine model-derived hypotheses. Data were collected and analyzed from a pilot study of 164 subjects. The initial results lend tentative support to six of the nine hypotheses, but not those postulating relationships between assurance seals and trust in eretailers.