Triggering trust:to what extent does the question influence the answer when evaluating the perceived importance of trust triggers?

Abstract

Trust is a critical component of business to consumer (B2C) e-Commerce success. In the absence of typical environmental cues that consumers use to assess vendor trustworthiness in the offline retail context, online consumers often rely on trust triggers embedded within e-Commerce websites to contribute to the establishment of sufficient trust to make an online purchase. This paper presents and discusses the results of a series of studies which took an initial look at the extent to which the context or manner in which trust triggers are evaluated may exert influence on the perceived importance attributed to individual triggers. We hope that our investigations will help inform the evaluation approaches adopted to assess consumer trust. © 2009 The Author.