There is conflicting evidence as to the current level of awareness and impact of Web Assurance Seal Services (WASSs). This study examines the effects of an educational intervention designed to increase consumer's knowledge, of security and privacy aspect of business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce websites and assurance seal services. The study further explores the relationships among consumers' perceptions about online security, including WASSs awareness, importance of WASS, privacy concerns, security concerns, and information quality, before and after the educational intervention. The study finds that educating consumers about the security and privacy dangers of the web, as well as the role of web assurance seals, does increase their awareness and perceived importance of the seals. However, despite this increased awareness, there is little association between these assurance seals and the two indicators of trustworthiness, concerns about privacy and perceived information quality, of an e-commerce site, even after the intervention. Only security concerns have a statistically significant relationship with WASSs awareness before and after the educational intervention. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.
Over the past decade, a number of studies have found consistently high levels of concern regarding online privacy and security [1], [2], [11], [14], [26], [35], [45], [62] and [65]. In the U.S., the National Fraud Information Center of the National Consumers League (NCL) showed that consumers reported losses of $895 per victim in Internet fraud in 2004, up from $527 in 2003 [46]. Moreover, despite growing concerns about the protection of consumer privacy in online commerce, there have been several highly publicized incidents where online vendors have sought to sell customer's private information despite having pledged against doing so in their privacy policies. Two very good examples are the cases of bankrupt Internet retailer (e-retailer) Toysmart [16] and Toys ‘Я’ Us [47].
Without protection mechanisms and/or practical regulations for online privacy and security, electronic commerce (e-commerce) will be impeded from developing into a true electronic marketplace of the future; where both consumers and businesses participate in exchanges and transactions as spontaneously as in the traditional marketplace. Thus, as one of the efforts to alleviate consumer concerns, a variety of assurance seal services on websites (e.g., WebTrust, Verisign, TRUSTe, BBBOnLine) have entered the online commerce arena to help consumers judge the trustworthiness of an online vendor. These firms offer a form of institution-based trust which is formed through societal institutions such as certification by account or governmental regulations [41], [54] and [70].
There is conflicting evidence as to the current level of awareness and impact of assurance seal services. Some studies [21], [32] and [69] find that the presence of an assurance seal results in an increased willingness to purchase by consumers, while others [11], [27] and [29] show that the effect is limited due to the consumer's lack of awareness and understanding of assurance services. The lack of understanding and awareness of assurance services suggest that there may be a need for greater effort to educate consumers about the role of assurance seals on the web.
Thus, the purpose of this study is to examine consumer's awareness of assurance services and the extent to which they perceive assurance seals to be important in business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce. We explore whether an intervention to educate consumers about the security and privacy dangers of the web, as well as the role of assurance services, influences their perceptions about the relative security and privacy of e-commerce sites they visit.
Research question: Does an intervention to educate consumers about website security features including privacy, security practices, information quality, and Web Assurance Seal Services affect consumer's perception of the website security features?
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we present some background literature regarding assurance services in e-commerce and the effect of educational interventions. Section 3 proposes a research model with a discussion of the research constructs in the model with hypotheses. Section 4 discusses research methodology and data collection. The results of the data analysis of study follow in the Section 5. Section 6 concludes the paper with a discussion of the findings, as well as the limitations and implications of this study.
In order to reduce consumer's perceived privacy and security risks, e-retailers have adopted WASSs as an institutional trust signal to consumers, warranting that the licensee website has met some standard with respect to privacy and security practices. However, due to the limited awareness of WASSs, it appears that many consumers are not using them to make inferences about the trustworthiness of e-commerce sites. This study investigated whether an educational intervention would increase consumer's awareness of WASSs, as well as the extent to which they perceived such seals to be important. We further examined the relationships among the latent variables.
6.1. Findings and future research
As we expected, the results of the study provide strong support for H1 and H2; educational intervention can influence the awareness and perceived importance of assurance seal services. Even though the levels of security and privacy concerns were changed slightly after the intervention, the differences are statistically not significant so that H3 and H4 are not supported. There are a couple of possible interpretations for these results. First, since consumers' security and privacy concerns are relatively long-term perception, a one-time educational intervention may be too little to change long held views. Second, even though the education intervention improves consumers' security and privacy concerns, the effect of third-party seals may alleviate the concerns which have been enhanced by the educational intervention. Thus, future investigation is required to identify whether the moderating effect of third-party seals on consumers' security and privacy concerns.
The educational intervention does not change consumers' perception of the website information quality so that the Hypothesis 5 is not supported. A possible explanation for the lack of effect is that consumers are already attentive to the quality of information when they make online transaction decisions. Hence an educational intervention only focusing on security, privacy and assurance seal services would do little to change these perceptions.
The SEM/PA analysis sheds additional light on how perceptions of security and privacy may be shaped. As for the relationship between information quality and security concerns, the results indicate that there is a strong, but inverse association between a site's information quality and consumer's security concerns, both before and after the educational intervention. That is, higher information quality reduces consumer's concerns about security of the site. The study highlights an interesting effect of the educational intervention on the extent of privacy risks associated with online transactions. The results show that there is a strong relationship between a site's information quality and consumer's privacy concern before the educational intervention. However, this strong relationship disappears after the educational intervention. This result implies that once consumers received more information about the potential privacy abuses of otherwise legitimate-looking businesses, the connection between a site's information quality and privacy disappeared. That is, simply having high quality information no longer predicts the perception that the merchant would engage in good behavior vis-à-vis consumer data. Hence, one effect of better consumer awareness of online privacy abuses is that consumers may use other indicators besides vendor supplied information to determine whether a site will protect their privacy.
Surprisingly, contrary to our expectations, only security concern has a statistically significant relationship with WASS awareness both before and after the educational intervention. This finding implies that although third-party seal programs may focus on several areas: privacy, security, and business integrity [27], WASSs are mainly recognized by consumers as a security protection mechanism. As Belanger, Hiller and Smith pointed out in their study [4], security is often seen by consumers as a more important issue than privacy. Whether this is indeed true is an interesting future research question. In addition, the findings of the study suggest that further research should be necessary for several areas, such as discovering why information quality interacts with security concerns and privacy concerns differently, and exploring why security and privacy concerns play different roles on consumer's awareness of WASSs.
6.2. Limitations
There are several limitations that need to be addressed in future work. First, the student sample does not represent the general e-commerce population and therefore can be criticized for a lack of external validity. Second, a sample of 125 subjects is relatively small for the analysis and may be subject to unexpected results based on idiosyncrasies in the data sample. Third, since the data had been collected through two stages for two weeks, there was a possibility of confounding effects of other variables, such as a social effect through discussion with peers. Finally, we also note that the study did not control for individual propensity variables, such as self-efficacy, and learning or goal oriented attitude, which may have influenced outcomes.
6.3. Contributions
Despite these limitations, the results presented in this study highlight the ambiguous role of WASSs in influencing consumer perceptions of online store trustworthiness, and suggest that greater efforts to inform consumers about these services are needed. The contributions of this study are twofold. From a practical perspective the findings show that educating consumers about the role of WASSs increases awareness and perceived importance of the seals. E-retailers that invest in these services should thus make greater efforts to educate their customers about the value of the seal. This is consistent with Dekleva's argument [13] regarding the importance of consumer education to achieve meaningful consumer protection from online security and privacy threats. Once online consumers are equipped with better knowledge of security and privacy issues, they will be better able to assess the trustworthiness of e-commerce websites and recognize the possibility of security threats. In addition, it appears that information quality has a major influence on customer's confidence in the security of online transactions. It will be important for e-retailers to improve information quality in order to build customer's confidence.
From a theoretical perspective, this study provides empirical evidence of the effects of an educational intervention on the level of awareness and consumer knowledge of security and privacy aspects of B2C e-commerce. While several fields of study (e.g., Dekleva [13]) has emphasized the importance of consumer education, i.e. banking, software implementation, and so on, to our knowledge there is no study concentrating on the influence of consumer education on security and privacy features in an electronic commerce context. Therefore, we hope that this study has provided some initial insights into the effects of consumer education on web security and privacy features especially Web Assurance Seal Services.
