Building Trust in E-Commerce: A Practical Trust Guide for Evaluation

Abstract

Market power in electronic marketplaces is increasingly developing into a monopoly. Digital pioneers like Amazon and eBay do not want to give up their market share easily. Especially, Small and Medium Enterprises, which try to offer their services online, have great difficulties in gaining market share. To understand the causes, we start a systematic literature review. The results show that building trust is a necessary precondition for success in e-commerce. For many small and medium-sized companies, entering the e-commerce market is a completely new business field. Therefore, they lack the knowledge and experience to build online trust successfully. We use the Design Science Research approach to solve this problem and develop a Trust Guide for online trust building. The Trust Guide is a set of design principles derived from trust theories. The main aim is to offer a practical trust guide for Small and Medium Enterprises, which helps them to build online trust in e-commerce.

Keywords

• design science research
• e-commerce
• online trust
• trust guide
• trust theories