فراتر از نگرانی : مدل قصد رفتاری - اعتماد -حریم خصوصی تجارت الکترونیک

Despite the recent economic downturn in the Internet and telecommunication sectors, electronic commerce (EC) will continue to grow and corporate Web sites will remain an important communication channel. However, legitimate concerns regarding privacy and trust remain potential obstacles to growth and important issues to both individuals and organizations. This study proposed and tested a theoretical model that considers an individual’s perceptions of privacy and how it relates to his or her behavioral intention to make an online transaction. An experiment that included over 200 subjects was conducted using two EC sites that differed only by the privacy dimensions of their notice, access, choice, and security. The results of this study suggested strong support for the model.

Over the past few years, electronic commerce (EC) has allowed organizations to enhance their economic growth, reduce barriers of market entry, improve efficiency and effectiveness, keep inventories lean, and reduce costs [29] and [40]. In fact, many consumers have found power in using the Internet: convenience, more choice for products and services, vast amounts of information, and time savings. They are not going to let a poor economy stop them from taking advantages of it. It is forecasted that business-to-consumer (B2C) spending will exceed US$ 95 billion in the US in 2003 and possibly US$ 250 billion by 2005. Moreover, business-to-business (B2B) online transactions now stand at more than US$ 2.6 trillion in the US, which is double the original estimate [50]. In order to achieve further growth, businesses need to understand their customers and build strong relationship with them. Today, many organizations collect customer information through registration, order, and/or survey forms, and by using “cookies” and tracking software to follow a customer’s online activities in order to gather information about their personal interests and preferences. This information has become extremely valuable because it allows a company to sell products and services tailored to specific customer needs. In addition, organizations can boost their revenues by selling advertising space on their Web sites because customers’ personal information can be used by advertisers to better target customers [35] and [42]. While many customers benefit from the online information gathered about them, concerns about privacy have become an important issue and potential obstacle (e.g., [25], [56], [61] and [66]). For example, a study of Hoffman and Hoffman and Novak [30] concluded that almost 95% of the Web users they surveyed have declined to provide personal information to Web sites at one time or another. It follows that many customers may not really trust a vendor when making purchases online. Moreover, many anticipated B2B transactions and information sharing may be less effective if business partners lack trust in the Internet [52]. While opportunities to collect and use customer information to create and sustain important relationships exist, privacy concerns may limit the potential of EC transactions. We proposed and tested a model that takes into account an individual’s perception of online privacy and how it related to their level of trust in a company’s electronic commerce Web site. In turn, the model suggested that trust was an important intermediary variable that influences behavioral intention for online transactions. The results of the study should be of interest to both academics and practitioners.

Strong support exists for the theoretical model. The implications are that privacy has a strong influence on whether an individual trusts an EC business. In turn, this will influence their behavioral intentions to purchase from or visit the site again, whether they will have positive things to say about the business, and whether they would recommend this EC site to others. Both the challenge and opportunity is to better understand individual perceptions concerning the level of trust an individual has with an electronic commerce storefront and his or her behavioral intentions. Therefore, the findings of this study should be of interest to both academics and practitioners. However, the findings should be of interest to practitioners: having a privacy policy may lead to more repeat visits and more purchases. It would also appear that a company can increase the level of trust and a customer’s behavioral intention by integrating the notice, access, choice, and security dimensions into the design of the e-commerce web site. In addition, having security controls in place and reinforcing the idea that the company is taking precautions to protect that data may be reassuring. Although strong support for the privacy-trust-behavioral intention model exists, the authors acknowledge several limitations. First, the samples only focused on American perceptions whereas e-commerce is a global activity. Unfortunately, the experiment as a research strategy has several weaknesses and generally does not provide a high degree of external validity that would allow for drawing more general conclusions. For our study, the relatively small sample size also might influence the stability of the SEM results and thus impact the findings.