| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
|
|
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
Trust has been identified by prior studies as a critical success factor for online businesses. It is imperative for organizations and researchers to study how consumer trust is promoted and cultivated in a virtual environment (Koufaris and Hampton-Sosa, 2004). Luo (2002) argued that the lack of online trust is one of the main reasons people drop out of online business transactions. Without a sufficient level of trust, many customers are unwilling to engage in e-commerce.
Brynjolfsson and Smith (2000) found that online retailers who offer the lowest prices do not necessarily register the highest sales for those products. They argued that this result is partially due to differences in the levels of trust in these online sellers. As a result, some Internet businesses have to lower their prices in order to compensate for a lower level of consumer trust, a practice that may hurt their long-term profitability and sustainability. Moreover, Ba and Pavlou (2002) found that high levels of trust enable vendors to charge premium prices.
Quelch and Klein (1996) showed that trust is a key factor in stimulating Internet purchases, especially at the early stages of commercial development. Greater levels of trust often lead to greater margins, sales, and profits, which are crucial for the survival and prosperity of an online business. At an international level, Huang et al. (2003) found that trust is an important factor in determining the Internet’s penetration and usage across countries.
Despite the mounting literature confirming the implications of consumer trust in the virtual marketplace, the dynamics that encourage the formation of such reliance have not been sufficiently examined. The purpose of this study is to look at the role of value congruence (or conflict) in creating (or destroying) e-patron trust. Value congruence is a measure of the amount of overlap between the values of potential customers and the values they perceive the organization to possess. The sharing of similar values, backgrounds and beliefs has been theorized and empirically demonstrated to produce trust between persons who hold these values in common (Cazier et al., 2003c, Zucker, 1986).