Consumer Trust in E-Commerce

Abstract

The lack of trust toward different elements of e-commerce has been recognized as one of the main causes of the collapse of a large number of dot-com companies. The concept of consumer trust has since been the object of many studies in the field of e-commerce. These studies permitted a better understanding of the role of trust in e-commerce, but an examination of the literature reveals that our understanding is limited due to important gaps in the ontological aspects of the trust concept, among which are (a) a lack of consensus concerning its definition, (b) a unidimensional as opposed to a multidimensional conceptualization of the construct, and (c) a confusion between trustworthiness and trust. The goal of this article is to identify these gaps and present ways of reducing their size and impacts.