An Empirical Study Of Chinese B2C Consumers' Initial Trust

Obviously, e-markets have much more advantages than traditional markets. But B2C (Business to Consumer) market is not as good as B2B (Business to Business) and C2C (Consumer to Consumer) markets, especially in China. Lack of trust is one of the most frequently cited reasons for consumers not purchasing from Internet vendors. The importance of initiating, building, and maintaining trust between buyers and sellers as key facilitors of successful e-commerce is increasingly being recognized in academic as well as in practioner communities. During the last four years few research results has come forth in China, and most of them didn' t fully take into account the Chinese social status and consumer habits. As an effort to understand initial trust in the B2C e-commerce context in China, this study uses previous studies to develop a initial trust research model. And empirical study was also done to explaining the factors impacting customers' initial trust in e-business.Environment-based factors are macro-level factors that impact trust. They are threshold factors by wich customers can think about weather they should or should not be involved in the relationship with web-merchants in general regardless of the merchants' characteristics. In order to provide a more understandable picture of customers' trust in web-merchants, some researchers gave the assumption that customers have already overcome the constraints of the e-commerce environment to narrowing the research scope. But this study not only focused on micro-level trust but also macro-level trust, and macro-level study of trust and micro-level study of trust have been set apart. Based on the previous empirical research and the difference between China and the developed countries, this study defined a e-trust research framework and a conceptual model, and then construct the consumer Macro-level Trust Research Model—MaTRM, and the consumer Micro-level Trust Research Model—MiTRM. These research models attempt to reorganize the factors impacting trust from environmental based, online merchant based, and consumer personal trait based factors.Using online survey method, the program automatically distinguish the respondents into four groups: first, hadn't bought anything from online merchant and wouldn't intend to buy in six months; second, hadn't bought anything from online merchant but intended to buy in six months; third, had bought something from online merchant once; fourth, had bought something from online merchant more than twice. The data of the first group was used to validate the MaTRM, the data of the second and the third groups were used to validate the MiTRM, and the data of the fourth group was used to analyze the robust trust. The empirical study provided evidence that the 'Word of Mouth Referrals of Internet shopping medium' was the most important factor to initiate consumer macro-level trust, and 'the rationality of the web transaction rule' was the most important factor to build robust trust. But the empirical study found that 'the reputation of the web merchant' was the most important factor to initiate micro-level initial trust, which was different from most other research results. This study had explained the possible reason that why the difference occur.At the same time, this study had compared the different effect of a factor in initiating, building, and maintaining trust between different relationship phases.