Trust and satisfaction are essential ingredients for successful business relationships in business-to-consumer electronic commerce. Yet there is little research on trust and satisfaction in e-commerce that takes a longitudinal approach. Drawing on three primary bodies of literature, the theory of reasoned action, the extended valence framework, and expectation-confirmation theory, this study synthesizes a model of consumer trust and satisfaction in the context of e-commerce. The model considers not only how consumers formulate their prepurchase decisions, but also how they form their long-term relationships with the same website vendor by comparing their prepurchase expectations to their actual purchase outcome. The results indicate that trust directly and indirectly affects a consumer's purchase decision in combination with perceived risk and perceived benefit, and also that trust has a longer term impact on consumer e-loyalty through satisfaction. Thus, this study extends our understanding of consumer Internet transaction behavior as a three-fold (prepurchase, purchase, and postpurchase) process, and it recognizes the crucial, multiple roles that trust plays in this process. Implications for theory and practice as well as limitations and future directions are discussed.
This study examines the impact of culture on trust determinants in computer-mediated commerce transactions. Adopting trust-building foundations from cross-culture literature and focusing on a set of well-established cultural constructs as groups of culture (Type I and Type II), this study develops a theoretical model of self-perception-based versus transference-based consumer trust in e-vendors, and empirically tests the model using cross-cultural data. The results show that transference-based trust determinants (i.e., "perceived importance of third-party seal" and "perceived importance of positive referral") are more positively related to consumer trust in e-vendors in a Type II (i.e., collectivist--strong uncertainty avoidance--high long-term orientation--high context) culture than in a Type I (i.e., individualistic--weak uncertainty avoidance--low long-term orientation--low context) culture. Unlike the initial hypothesized expectations, self-perception-based trust determinants (i.e., perceived security protection, perceived privacy concern, and perceived system reliability) do not show stronger roles to consumer trust in e-vendors in a Type I culture than in a Type II culture, although the stronger negative effect of perceived privacy concerns is observed on consumer trust in e-vendors in a Type I culture than in a Type II culture. Theoretical contributions for e-commerce cross-culture literature and implications for multinational online business managers are discussed.