Factors Impacting Chinese Consumers' Macro-Level Trust on B2C E-commerce: An Empirical Study

摘要

Developing consumers’ macro-level trust in e-commerce environment is critical for online vendors. This type of trust provides the threshold for consumers to begin buying online. As an effort to understand Chinese consumers’ macro-level trust, the study analyzes the status of e-commerce in China, and provides a research model for investigating the main antecedents influencing consumers’ trust in the environment. Consumers’ macro-level trust was analyzed from three aspects: environment based factors, web-merchant related factors and consumer related factors. With the online survey method, empirical results are also presented. The results indicate that the word of mouth referral of the environment, among others, has the stronger effect on consumers’ macro-level trust.