A Cognitive Dissonance Perspective of Customers' Online Trust in Multi-Channel Retailers

Although multi-channel retailers can leverage on offline advantages for their online sales, it has been challenging for them to attract customers to make repeated online purchases. This can be attributed to the development of online trust which has long been cited as central for customers to continually make online purchases from retailers. Even though online trust has been extensively studied in marketing and MIS literature, research efforts generally focus on pure online retailers and there has been no research to investigate the development of online trust in multi-channel retailers during the postpurchase phase. After making initial online purchases from the multi-channel retailer, customers are likely to encounter or even search for information sources (social contacts and online reviews) that may be dissonant with their own online purchasing experiences, causing them to reevaluate their online trust. Hence, this paper addresses the following research question: How do customers jointly evaluate post-purchase information sources and their own online purchasing experiences to reformulate online trust? Since multi-channel retailers have offline and online channels of sales to their customers, we are also interested to investigate: How do customers evaluate their offline and online purchasing experiences to reformulate online trust during the post-purchase phase? This paper draws on the cognitive dissonance theory to present a model of online trust development in multichannel retailers during the post-purchase phase.