C2c E-commerce The Initial Trust Established Empirical Analysis

There are two things very important for online vendors, those individual sellers on Taobao.com, doing business with individual consumer:the first one is how to increase page view of their online stores, while the second is about persuading consumers buying products from them. The first thing is related to how to make full use of Taobao.com's Product Searching Tools, and the second is about how to build initial trust among consumers passing by. This paper focuses on the latter one. Many factors influence initial trust creation, and this paper is going to categorize these varied factors into two distinct groups-trustee-related attributes and trustor-related attributes. Researchers have done many meaningful studies on these factors. From the perspective of trustee-related attributes, Mayer (1995) theorized that trustee's ability, benevolence, and integrity will directly influence trust-building. On the other hand, McKnight (1998) argued that trustor's cognitive form will also strongly influence consumers'trust-building. This paper will test these two arguments with data collected directly from Taobao.com. There is a major difference between this study and other similar empirical studies, which lies on the distinct sources of data. Former empirical researchers have developed some useful measuring scales to gauge subjects' perceived levels of some constructs related to this topic, such as trust belief and trust intention, and then use these scales to collect data from subjects. However, this paper will not apply these scales (neither does the procedure of collecting data from people), but instead, it will use the hard data collected directly from online database. The data collection mainly focuses on information about store and product. This paper intends to provide practitioner with some material guiding principles. In this paper, we get no means to directly recognize the initial trust level among consumers, and instead, we use the sales ratio as initial level's proxy variable, which follows the guide of Ajzen's theory of planned behavior (1991). Also, this study reveals the complex action mechanism of product price on sales ratio, and obtains another nine important factors imposing the most influence on sales ratio.