تاثیر اعتماد مصرف کننده روی وفاداری نگرشی و مقاصد خرید در بازار های الکترونیکیB2C : اعتماد واسطه در مقابل اعتماد فروشنده

The online merchant of an e-marketplace consists of an intermediary, providing the market infrastructure, and the community of sellers conducting business within that infrastructure. Typically, consumers willingly buy from unknown sellers within an e-marketplace, despite the apparent risk, since they trust the institutional mechanisms furnished by the relatively well-known intermediary. Consumers’ trust in one component of the e-marketplace merchant may not only affect their trust in the other, but also influence the way consumers make online purchases. This paper explores the impact of trust on consumer behavior in e-marketplaces. An empirical study has been conducted to accomplish our research objectives, using a questionnaire survey of 222 active e-marketplace shoppers in Korea. The results reveal that consumer trust in an intermediary has a strong influence upon both attitudinal loyalty and purchase intentions, although consumer trust in the community of sellers has no significant effect on the two constructs representing consumer behavior. In addition, it was found that trust is transferred from an intermediary to the community of sellers, implying that the trustworthiness of the intermediary plays a critical role in determining the extent to which consumers trust and accept the sellers in the e-marketplace. This paper offers some implications from the findings of the research.

Today, online marketplaces are growing at an unprecedented rate, and the volume of transactions in e-marketplaces is expanding. One obvious reason for this new trend is that online consumers find it more beneficial to shop at e-marketplaces than at digital storefronts, due to the reduced purchasing costs resulting from the ability to shop comparatively among multiple sellers. Unfortunately, the number of incidents of fraud and other victimization in e-marketplaces has been on the rise too. For example, Internet auction fraud has been, by far, the most reported offense, comprising 42.8% of 49,711 total referred cases in 2001, 61.0% of 63,316 cases in 2003, and 35.7% of 219,553 cases in 2007 (Internet Crime Complaint Center, 2007). E-marketplaces are especially vulnerable to threats originating from transactions conducted over the Internet. This is chiefly because the e-marketplace business model involves an intermediary who connects sellers with buyers, and intermediaries are not responsible for controlling the sales transactions conducted by the sellers. Online marketplaces have a range of IT-enabled institutional mechanisms (e.g., feedback mechanisms, third-party escrow services, and credit card guarantees) in place to ensure that buyer trust in the community of online sellers comes into existence (Pavlou & Gefen, 2004). Besides, electronic intermediaries minimize transaction risks by establishing policies and rules to build trust in the sellers (Clark & Lee, 1999). Nevertheless, consumers’ discontent with the fundamental lack of trust on the part of e-marketplaces as a whole remains a barrier to the growth of intermediary-based e-commerce. Trust in e-marketplaces often becomes a major issue for two reasons. First, e-marketplaces typically consist of SOHO (small office home office) sellers who process a limited volume of transactions daily and handle returns or exchanges with limited manpower resources. Second, the e-marketplace business model involves two parties who act to serve customers for transactions: namely, an intermediary and sellers. For that reason, it may often become obscure who is responsible for problems that may occur in the course of order fulfillment. As competition among the service providers becomes more intense, most companies focus on short-term goals, like increasing sales and transaction volumes, rather than long-term goals, like improving consumer trust and sustaining loyal customers. It is imperative that e-marketplaces take steps to establish trust so that consumers can engage in transactions with good faith in the service providers of the marketplace. The trust literature suggests that trust importantly affects consumer behavior in electronic commerce. Since in online marketplaces, trust is viewed as consisting of two categories including intermediary trust and seller trust, it will be essential to understand how these two types of consumer trust influence purchase behavior. However, related studies (for example, Pavlou and Gefen, 2004 and Verhagen et al., 2006) have focused on examining the effects of only seller trust on consumers’ purchase behavior. Little attention has been paid to a comparative examination of the direct influence of intermediary trust and seller trust on purchasing. In addition, it will be worthwhile to study possible transfer of trust between an intermediary and the community of sellers. Provided that the transfer occurs, it is arguable that consumers put reliance on unknown sellers associated with the trustworthy intermediary. Meanwhile, while trustworthiness and trust are two related, but distinct, concepts, researchers tend to use the terms interchangeably. Perceived trustworthiness of a merchant is often a determinant of overall trust in that merchant, and therefore there exists a need to investigate the influence of merchant trustworthiness on the subsequent trust in the e-marketplace setting. This paper explores the impact of buyer's trust in online marketplaces on consumer behavior. It focuses on the following three Research Questions (RQ) that will be answered through an empirical study. RQ 1: “How does each factor of trustworthiness affect consumer trust in an intermediary?” RQ 2: “Is trust in an intermediary transferable to trust in the community of sellers in online marketplaces?” RQ 3: “How does trust in an intermediary and trust in the community of sellers respectively influence customer's attitudinal loyalty and purchase intentions in online marketplaces?”

Much attention has been given to the antecedents and consequences of consumer trust in the context of online shopping. However, past research conducted to address this research issue has focused on trust in generic online shops such as Toysrus.com, and few researchers have examined how trust affects consumer behavior in e-marketplaces that are regarded as riskier than ordinary online merchants. The present study aimed at closing this gap by posing three fundamental research questions: first, how the trustworthiness factors affect trust in an intermediary; second, whether there is trust transfer from an intermediary to the community of sellers; and finally, how the overall trust in an intermediary influences customers’ purchase behavior. The findings of the study can be summarized as follows. First, of the three factors of trustworthiness, benevolence and integrity were found to have a statistically significant influence on consumer trust in an intermediary. Second, it was found that trust in an intermediary can readily turn into trust in the community of sellers in an e-marketplace. Third, results suggest that trust in an intermediary influences both attitudinal loyalty and purchase intentions in a B2C e-marketplace, whereas trust in the community of sellers affects neither. Finally, attitudinal loyalty turned out to be an important determinant of purchase intentions. It is worthwhile to mention key contributions of our research. First, our study focuses on the impact of trust particularly in e-marketplaces. While there exist a host of studies on consumer trust, they mostly center on issues related to e-commerce trust building in general, such as trust antecedents. Our research is unique in that it divides the e-marketplace supplier up into two separate entities (i.e., intermediary and sellers), and uses this dichotomy to analyze the impact of e-marketplace trust. Second, our research helped unveil the nature of transferability of trust from an intermediary to sellers in online marketplaces. It will set forth related studies designed to explore practical strategies to make transfer of trust more effectively. Third, this research represents the first study to investigate the influence of intermediary trust as well as seller trust on attitudinal loyalty and purchase intentions in e-marketplaces. It helps practitioners develop strategies to generate desired changes in consumer behavior. The present research is subject to limitations. First, G-market, the e-marketplace on which our questionnaire survey is based, may not be representative of all the e-marketplaces in Korea. As of May 2009, the top three e-marketplaces in Korea were G-market, Auction, and 11th Street with market shares of 37.6%, 37.5%, and 23.7% respectively (Computertimes, May 25, 2009). Presently both G-market and Auction are owned by the global C2C auction leader, eBay. For this reason, it is presumed that G-market and Auction both are run under a similar transactional infrastructure, and that survey results are not likely to be different from each other, whether the study is based on G-market or Auction. However, since the study is based on only one e-marketplace, cautions may be needed in generalizing the results. Second, a portion of data was discarded to improve CFA results, when we dropped the six items in the survey questionnaire that were found to have low standardized regression coefficients. The elimination process may have helped improve the validity of the measurement model, but resulted in ruling out a small part of the voices of the respondents. Third, there exists minor overlap in the items to measure the two conceptually distinct constructs – attitudinal loyalty and purchase intentions. For example, the item “I will continue to visit this Website” for attitudinal loyalty is not much different from the item “I would return to this e-marketplace's Website” for purchase intentions. Even if there is a very slim chance that this item similarity has contributed to the high correlation between the two constructs, it is important to make sure that a questionnaire includes only the items that uniquely characterizes each research construct, so that there is no conceptual redundancy in the items.