Consumer Trust in E-Commerce Websites: A Meta-Study
Trust is at once an elusive, imprecise concept, and a critical attribute that must be engineered into e-commerce systems. Trust conveys a vast number of meanings, and is deeply dependent on context. The literature on engineering trust into e-commerce systems reflects this ambiguous meaning; there are a large number of articles, but there is as yet no clear theoretical framework for the investigation of trust in e-commerce. E-commerce, however, is predicated on trust; indeed, any e-commerce vendor that fails to establish a trusting relationship with their customers is doomed. There is a very clear need for specific guidance on e-commerce system attributes and business operations that will effectively promote consumer trust. To address this need, we have conducted a meta-study of the literature on trust in e-commerce systems. Our overall finding is that this area of research is still immature, and hence our meta-analysis is qualitative rather than quantitative. We identify the major theoretical frameworks that have been proposed in the literature, and propose a qualitative model incorporating the various factors that have been found to influence consumer trust in e-commerce. As this model is too complex to be of practical use, we explore the subsets of this model that have the strongest support in the literature. Finally, we outline key conceptual and methodological needs for future work in this topic.