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Top1. Introduction
In October 2020, there were around 4.67 billion internet users worldwide, encompassing 59 percept of the global population (Statista, 2020a). Of these internet users, 50.4 percent were males and 49.6 percent were females (Statisa, 2020b). Online vendors are always interested in capturing internet users; they do so by creating positive shopping experiences that encourage them to form trust in online transactions (Masele & Matama, 2020; Pengnate & Sarathy, 2017). There is a business case for this purpose. According to Chou, Chen, and Lin (2015), “When trust is formed, people are more likely to purchase or repeat their purchase of an item from a website” (p. 544).
It is expected that website design can lead to online trust, although research that systematically examines such a relationship is little (Hussein, Chauhan, Dalmer, Rudzicz, & Boger, 2020). In addition, far too little attention has been paid to understand the effect of website design elements on e-trust across gender (Mukherjee, 2020; Sohaib, Kang & Nuvunnabi, 2019). This has presented a significant gap in the literature. This study, therefore, aims to contribute to the existing body of knowledge by offering much insight into the influence of three elements of website design (visual design, information design, and navigation design) on consumer trust in e-commerce. This study also focuses on an important, but largely ignored, issue in previous research: The moderating role of gender in the context of e-commerce.
While gender differences have been an important research topic in various fields, until quite recently, there has been little discussion about this topic in e-shopping literature. As indicated by Cyr and Head (2013): “The moderating effect of gender has been studied in a variety of Information Technology (IT) settings, but has rarely been examined in an e-shopping setting.” (p. 1359). More recently, Lin, Featherman, Brooks, and Hajli, (2019,p 1187) have argued that “gender effects remains poorly understood in the E-commerce settings”.
Gender has long been considered to play a key role in moderating the effect of design features on consumers’ evaluative judgements (Holbrook, 1986). Previous studies have found prominent differences between men and women in terms of online trust (Mukherjee, 2020), confidence in privacy protection on the internet (Park, 2015), IT usage (Assaker, 2019; Shaouf & Altaqqi, 2018), motivations to use social networking sites (Mouakket, 2018; Noguti, Singh, & Waller, 20219), website design perceptions (Cyr & Bonanni, 2005; Moss, Gunn, & Heller, 2006), visual attention to online shopping information (Hwang & Lee, 2018), and decision-making processes (Gonzalez, Meyer & Toldos, 2021).
Recently, empirical research has suggested that such differences may moderate the way through which online users respond to online stimuli (Aboobucker, 2019; Jain, Gajjar, & Shah, 2020; Kim, Kim, Yoo, & Park, 2020; Santo & Trigo, 2020; Sohaib et al., 2019; Tan & Ooi, 2018). As such, the success of this study could offer prolific insights for IT managers, website designers, and e-marketers into the way through which website design influences users’ responses across the respective genders.