Chapter 1
Introduction
This chapter focus the research by explaining the various parts of the topic. It also clears the various reasons and the motivation to do this research. This chapter finish with the clear aims of the research, some questions of the research and a short summary on the framework of the essay.
1.1 Introduction
In recent time period, technology has totally modified the style of living of the people by allocating them with sophisticated and advanced techniques for communication. One of the biggest example is internet which have altered the economic and social attitude of human beings by eliminating all the national barriers and allocating them with 24 hour assistance in any corner of the world (Vrechopoulos et al, 2003). As we can see in today’s world, every person, community and organisation have begun to understand the great advantage of using Internet, E-Commerce, one of the great products of the Internet, is growing very rapidly in today’s connected world. For example: the rise of companies such as e-bay and amazon.com. Though both e-commerce and Internet show a rising trend, the progress in development rate of e-commerce is lower than that of the Internet. Research carried out by various researchers on e-commerce has found many factors that have resulted in this discrepancy, but the main reason is the trust of the consumer in online shopping. It has been identified as one of the biggest formiddable difficulty for the E-vendors to involve people in E-commerce occupation(Wang and Emurian, 2005).
What is Trust?
In organisational behaviour trust is a complex topic to deal with. Researchers over the ages, have given various definitions of the word trust. One of the important findings has been the revelation of trust as a interpersonal determinant of behaviour handling with the concepts of morality, benevolence, ability and predictability of the people’s behaviour.
In E-commerce context, Gefen has defined trust as a single area, which makes consumers rely on the trustworthiness of the vendors. For the purpose of this thesis, Trust has been defined as the attitude of a consumer toward E-vendor’s trustworthiness and legitimacy and it also includes other elements such as their competence integrity and predictability.
1.2 Aims And Objectives
As from this topic only, it is not difficult to say that this research has a great focus on buyer or shopper trust in online activities. The primary objectives are as follows:
To create a good understanding of the consumer’s point of view especially when they buy things online.
To understand clearly the consumer’s trust issues related to business to consumer (B2C) E-commerce.
How the trust of the online buyer or consumer affects the E-vendors.
And finally to provide the guidelines to E-vendors including how to achieve better consumers trust, to persuade them to buy things online and to improve business to consumer E-commerce.
1.3 Background or nature of the research problem:
Trust has been identified as an important factor in ascertaining the success of business to consumer E-commerce (Corritore, Krecher and Wiedenbeck, 2003). According to the Office of fair trade report (OFT), almost 34 per cent of the online users do not buy the things online because of absence of trust. It is the most important element for E-vendors to encourage the consumers to buy the things or services from them.
Gefen and Straub (2004) said that, trust is the more important issue in E-commerce as comparing to traditional commerce due to lack of standards and principles in justifying the online activities instantly.
A very huge level of trust not only arouses people to purchase the products online but it also assists the E-vendors by longer term advantages like, increases the future purchases (Garbarino and Johnson 1999), maintains a healthy and long term relationship with customers (Keen, 1997), stimulates consumers commitment (Yamagishi and yamagishi, 1997), increases customer satisfaction (Sanzo et al .2003),
Helps in gaining competitive advantage Wernerfelt, 1991), etc. Although we have discussed the various advantages of consumer’s trust but creating trust in consumers mind is still a difficult task for maximum E-vendors (Ba and Pavlov 2002) because many consumers has a insecure image of Internet in their mind. Some of the dangers while shopping online are E-vendors impersonator, stealing credit card pin and numbers, defects in the products. All these issues incorporate together and make difficult the consumer’s belief in online shopping. Therefore the utmost considerable thing for an E-vendor is to understand the consumer’s issue of trust, And to find out the various ways to improve these issues that encourage them to purchase goods and services through Internet.
The author aims to ask pertinent questions, find out the chief reasons that ieffects the consumer’s trust in online shopping.
By doing so, he also aims to zero-in the factors, which will be useful for the E-vendors to foster consumer’s faith in Business to consumer E-commerce.