Trust and Satisfaction, Two Stepping Stones for Successful E-Commerce Relationships: A Longitudinal Exploration

Trust and satisfaction are essential ingredients for successful business relationships in business-toconsumer electronic commerce. Yet there is little research on trust and satisfaction in e-commerce that takes a longitudinal approach. Drawing on three primary bodies of literature, the theory of reasoned action, the extended valence framework, and expectation-confirmation theory, this study synthesizes a model of consumer trust and satisfaction in the context of electronic commerce. The model considers not only how consumers formulate their pre-purchase decisions, but also how they form their long-term relationships with the same website vendor by comparing their pre-purchase expectations to their actual purchase outcome. The results indicate that trust directly and indirectly affects a consumer’s purchase decision in combination with perceived risk and perceived benefit, and also indicate that trust has a longer term impact on consumer e-loyalty through satisfaction. Thus, this study extends our understanding of consumer Internet transaction behavior as a three-fold (pre-purchase, purchase and, post-purchase) process, and it recognizes the crucial, multiple roles that trust plays in this process. Implications for theory and practice as well as limitations and future directions are discussed.