Building customer trust within e-commerce environments: The role of agents and virtual reality

In e-commerce, trust becomes an essential prerequisite for customer relationship building and the success of a business endeavor. This paper proposes a framework for the formation of trust in customer-business relationships in e-commerce, synthesizing a series of trust constructs, determinant variables and trust building processes drawn from established theoretical work on trust and relationship marketing. The framework is conceptualized in the context of an electronic servicescape, where trust is formed through iterative interactions with promises being made, enabled and fulfilled. Based on the principles derived, the paper argues that agent and virtual reality technologies can provide the environment and facilitate the expressiveness demanded by such a servicescape and describes an agent-mediated virtual environment for e-commerce to illustrate the practical applicability of the framework.