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For e-business, location is irrelevant and competition is intense. To succeed in this environment, organizations must find new ways to differentiate themselves from their competition. One way to achieve e-business differentiation is to foster trust by building a perception of value congruence and avoiding a perception of value conflict. We explore how value congruence contributes to and how value conflict decreases trust in e-businesses. An experiment was conducted to examine the respective impacts of value congruence and value conflict on trust in an e-commerce setting. Our results show that, for e-businesses, value congruence has an enabling effect on trust while value conflict reduces trust. Such effects are strong enough to suggest that value congruence can be employed as an effective way for e-businesses to differentiate themselves while creating and sustaining competitive advantage. Managerial implications are drawn from our results.

Trust makes business possible. Without it, few transactions would occur. Consumers must trust a seller to deliver a product as agreed. Clients may also refuse to do business if they do not trust the security and privacy practices of the vendor. In the brick-and-mortar world, customers can alleviate their concerns through face-to-face interaction with a human; physical presence of the business offers assurance that it exists, is accessible, and is trustworthy. In the online virtual marketplace, it is difficult to develop such trust. Building and marketing a business in the online world poses unique challenges. When the well-known four P's (product, price, promotion and place) of marketing were developed in the 1960s, place was considered important. The four P's have been extensively studied by researchers and employed by practitioners [2]. However, online businesses need a new model for success, as place has become an irrelevant factor in this arena. Wilson and Abel [42] claimed that on the Internet location has become a non-issue, and with the declining importance of place, other factors are more critical. A new factor that may substitute for place is perception, including the customer's perceptions of trust, value congruence, and other factors that motivate customers to complete a transaction. As competition turns intense in e-commerce, perception may be very influential and perceived value congruence can become more important. With the competition just a click away, e-businesses must find other ways to distinguish themselves from competitors. Trust has been identified as a critical success factor for businesses. It is therefore imperative to study how online consumer trust is promoted and cultivated [20]. Luo [22] argued that lack of online trust is a main reason that people drop out of online business transactions. Without sufficient trust, they are unwilling to engage in e-commerce. Brynjolfsson and Smith [7] reported that an online retailer with the lowest prices does not necessarily register high sales for its products. They argued that this result is partially due to differences in the levels of trust in online sellers. As a consequence, some Internet businesses have to lower their prices to compensate for less consumer trust—a practice that may hurt their long-term profitability and sustainability. Ba and Pavlou [4] found that high levels of trust allowed vendors to charge price premiums. Quelch and Klein [30] showed that trust is a key factor in stimulating Internet purchases, especially at the early stages of commercial development. Greater levels of trust often lead to greater margins, more sales, and higher profits; these are crucial for the survival and prosperity of online business. At an international level, Huang et al. [15] found that trust is an important factor in increasing the Internet's penetration and usage. However, much work still needs be done to determine the production of trust in e-business. Our paper attempts to look at the role played by value congruence (conflict) in creating (destroying) trust. Value congruence or compatibility is a measure of the amount of overlap between the values of customers and those values they believe the organization possesses. The sharing of values, backgrounds, and beliefs has been empirically demonstrated to produce trust between persons that share common values [8]. While many other factors can influence trust in e-business, value congruence may be unique and particularly important. The durability of affect-based trust created through value congruence makes it more desirable than trust created by other means. This qualitative difference sets value congruence apart and merits further study and evaluation. In this study, we examine the relationship between value congruence and trust to analyze how sellers in the online marketplace can harness this relationship.

Our findings suggest that value congruence is an important tool for e-businesses to differentiate themselves. We demonstrated that value congruence helps build trust and value conflict reduces trust. As competition turns intense, it becomes more important for companies to distinguish themselves from the competition. Value congruence can be an effective tool for increasing trust to achieve this. For traditional business, the four P's of marketing are price, product, promotion and place. For e-businesses, place becomes irrelevant. However, the perception of value congruence may be an important marketing tool in helping to provide competitive advantages for e-businesses. As competition and commoditization make it more difficult to compete on price, product and promotion, value congruence may offer the opportunity for organizations to establish a long-term competitive advantage in e-commerce.