Creating Onlin Trust: An Experimental Approach

Lack of trust has been identified as one of the reasons for absence of interest in doing online transactions. Therefore, one of the research areas is about knowing factors that enhance customer’s online trust. Unlike most researches in this area that use a descriptive method, this research tried an experimental approach in the retailing industry context to study the effects of reputation, offline presence and product type on online customers trust and the interactions between these factors. For doing the experiment a 2×2×2 between subjects factorial design was used. For manipulating independent variables, eight scenarios for different combinations of independent variables levels were designed and data analyzing was done by using factorial Anova. Results declined existence of any significant interaction between variables and showed that having positive reputation and offline presence will lead to higher online trust. But product type does not have any significant effect on customer’s trust.