Trust Building in Internet Vendors: Comparison of New and Repeat Customers

摘要

With the increase of Internet users, the numbers of clicks on the websites of Internet vendors have grown considerably. However, vendors have experienced disappointment in converting these clicks into purchases. Lack of trust is identified as one of the greatest barriers inhibiting Internet transaction (Hoffman et al., 1999). Trust is argued to affect purchase intention of new customers (Jarvenpaa et al., 2000) and the loyalty of repeat customers (Gefen, 2002). According to social exchange theory (Blau, 1964), trust is constantly modified in the process of exchange between the partners over time. In the initial phase of trust development, new customers tend to be more exploratory with an Internet vendor (McKnight et al., 1998). No matter how much secondhand knowledge is known of the vendor, without real purchase experience, such knowledge alone is unlikely to lead to stabilized trust. In contrast, those customers who have purchase experiences with an Internet vendor can be more confident in their trust. In this way, trust evolves along the customer's experience with a vendor from an initial trust to stabilized trust (Jones and George, 1998). Though the literature has proposed the notion of trust as a dynamic concept, little has been done to compare the different stages and nature of trust. In the context of Electronic Commerce (EC), much of the prior research investigated only the initial trust (i.e., Gefen et al., 2003; Jarvenpaa et al., 2000; McKnight et al., 2002). The objective in this research is to examine the building of trust for new and repeat customers' of an Internet vendor. Similar to the classification of pre-encounter trust and post-encounter trust (Singh and Sirdeshmukh, 2000), we classify trust in an Internet vendor into two types, based on the online customer's purchase experience with that vendor: pre-purchase trust and post-purchase trust. Pre-purchase trust drives new customers to have the first transaction with a vendor, converting clicks into purchases (Jarvenpaa et al., 2000). Post-purchase trust influences repeat customers to have a long-term relationship with a vendor (Gefen, 2002). For this reason, understanding how trust is built and evolves over purchase experience is critical to the proliferation of EC. To this end, this study addresses two research questions: (1) what factors foster trust in an Internet vendor for new and repeat customers respectively? (2) how is trust built differently by new and repeat customers?