Trust in E-Commerce: The Importance of the Experience and Relationship With This New Sales System – New Business Commerce

Introduction

The theme of e-commerce in everything is linked to the management and the marketing and it is to the managers of these two areas that it has been putting more challenges over the last decades.

One of the weaknesses of the Internet, on which e-commerce is based, makes security one of the major problems consumers encounter when shopping online (Abyad, 2017; Ashraf, Thongpapanl & Spyrapoulous, 2016; Suh & Han, 2003). This is because consumers, in general, can not control the security of the personal and financial information they send to the buying sites (Abyad, 2017; Corbitt, Thanasankit & Yi, 2003). And this may leave to a lack of trust in this kind of commerce.

Companies with an Internet presence in Portugal increase from 25.8% in 2003 to 62.7% in 2018 (Pordata, 2018). However, little is known about Portuguese consumer behavior in terms of experience with e-commerce, social media usage, trust in e-commerce and anxiety in use e-commerce.

The principal objective of this research is to analyse the antecedents which lead consumers to trust on purchase in e-commerce, testing the moderating effect of anxiety with this kind of new commerce. The antecedents are divided into two types: (1) consumer experience with e-commerce and (2) the influence of social media usage in the consumer trust in e-commerce. It was carried out this analysis in the north of Portugal and only consider in the sample consumers with experience in e-commerce, who have at least one re-purchase and are thinking about continuing to purchase on e-commerce and are frequent users of at least one social media. This research derives from technology acceptance model (TAM), along with the concepts of consumers experience with e-commerce, social media usage, anxiety and trust in e-commerce. The novelty of the research is the analyses of the moderate effect of anxiety in the relationship between the consumer experience with e-commerce, the influence of social media in e-commerce and consumer trust in e-commerce.

The structure of this chapter is as follows. First, is done a literature review of trust in Internet shopping, with a focus on two antecedents – consumer experience with e-commerce and social media usage – and a moderator variable – anxiety with the discussion of the objective of the research and the propose of the conceptual model. Second, the methodology of the research is presented followed by the analysis and results. Then, the discussion and conclusions are discussed. Finally, the theoretical and managerial implication is discussed, limitations and future research are presented.