The Role of Proximity in Willingness to Transact: The Effects of Trust and Culture

We seek to operationalie a new construct, proximity, and identify its role in customers’ willingness to transact online. Trust is a well studied phenomenon in ecommerce, but it falls short in explaining some hitherto intangible aspects of online transactions such as how users feel about doing business with a particular company. There are clearly cultural differences in the need for face to face contact when doing business which spill over into the world of e-commerce. We use the proximity construct to effectively explain some differences in behavioural intention that cannot be explained by culture or trust alone.