THE INVESTIGATION OF THE FACTORS ASSOCIATING CONSUMERS’ TRUST IN E-COMMERCE ADOPTION

The success of electronic commerce significantly depends on providing security and
privacy for its consumers’ sensitive personal information. Consumers’ lack of
acceptance in electronic commerce adoption today is not merely due to the concerns
on security and privacy of their personal information, but also lack of trust and
reliability of web vendors. Consumers’ trust in online transactions is crucial for the
continuous growth and development of electronic commerce. Since Business to
Consumer (B2C) e-commerce requires the consumers to engage the technologies, the
consumers face a variety of security risks. This study addressed the role of security,
privacy and risk perceptions of consumers to shop online in order to establish a
consensus among them. The findings provided reliability, factors analysis for the
research variables and for each of the study’s research constructs, correlations as well
as regression analyses for both non-online purchasers’ and online purchasers’
perspectives, and structural equation modeling (SEM) for overall model fit. The
overall model was tested by AMOS 18.0 and the hypothesis, assumptions for SEM
and descriptive statistics were analyzed by SPSS 12.0.
The empirical results of the first study indicated that there were poor correlations
existed between consumers’ perceived security and consumers’ trust as well as
between consumers’ perceived privacy and consumers’ trust regarding e-commerce
transactions. However, the construct of perceived privacy manifested itself primarily
through perceived security and trustworthiness of web vendors. While trustworthiness
of web vendors was a critical factor in explaining consumers’ trust to adopt ecommerce,
it was important to pay attention to the consumers’ risk concerns on ecommerce
transactions. It was found that economic incentives and institutional trust
had no impact on consumers’ perceived risk.
Findings from the second study indicated that perceived privacy was still to be the
slight concern for consumers’ trust in e-commerce transactions, though poor
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relationships or associations existed between perceived security and consumers’ trust,
between trustworthiness of web vendors and consumers’ trust, and between perceived
risk and consumers’ trust. The findings also showed that the construct of perceived
privacy manifested itself primarily through perceived security and trustworthiness of
web vendors. It was found that though economic incentives influenced a consumers’
perceived risk in online transactions, institutional trust had no impact on consumers’
perceived risk.
Overall findings suggested that consumers’ perceived risk influenced their trust in
e-commerce transactions, while the construct of perceived privacy manifested itself
primarily through perceived security as well as trustworthiness of web vendors. In
addition, though economic incentives had no impact on consumers’ perceived risk,
institutional trust influenced a consumers’ perceived risk in online transactions. The
findings also suggested that economic incentives and institutional trust had
relationships or associations with consumers’ perceived privacy.
The findings from this research showed that consumers’ perceived security and
perceived privacy were not mainly concerned to their trust in e-commerce
transactions though consumers’ perceived security and perceived privacy might
slightly influence on the trustworthiness of web vendors in dealing with online store
sites abroad. Furthermore, consumers’ perceptions on the trustworthiness of web
vendors were also related to their perceived risks and the concern about privacy was
also addressed to perceived risks.
Index terms: Perceived security; perceived privacy; perceived risk; trust;
consumers’ behaviour; SEM