| A major problem facing the full deployment of business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce is the development of trust on the side of the consumer. While a great deal of effort has been spent on privacy and secure transactions, resulting in seals of approvals and trustmarks, little has been done in the way of developing systems that will assure the consumer that the e-commerce site with which they are dealing is "legitimate" in such things as delivery, return policies, etc. Seals just say good or bad, not 'how' good or 'how' bad. The need is for trustworthy evaluation based on multiple dimensions. Having identified this need, we have developed a generic architecture that supports trusted third party ratings stored at distributed Label Bureaus. An Application Server, retrieving labels using a Label Engine and multi-dimensional rating systems, derives the rating by applying a rating algorithm. This architecture supports third party labeling allowing the consumer to develop a rational trust level in unknown businesses. |
