Combining Various Trust Factors for E-commerce Platforms Using Analytic Hierarchy Process

E-commerce has grown rapidly worldwide over the course of the past five years. Despite appearance, ecommerce industry is faced with many challenges, among which trust is the biggest issue. In this paper, we take China’s largest C2C e-commerce platform–Taobao– as an example and focus on two disadvantages of current trust model: trust is easily manipulated by defrauders and trust dimensions prove insufficient. We propose to integrate various trust factors and build a dynamic trust model to deter trust fraud. In this paper, we identify the factors that affect trust in ecommerce platforms and make use of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to determine the weights of the above factors for the trust model. We utilize concrete survey results of Taobao buyers rather than experts’ knowledge to determine the relative importance of these trust factors. Therefore, our proposed method will yield a practical solution to the trust problem of e-commerce industry.