E-Business Trust Report

As the Internet develops and matures, its success will depend in large part on gaining and maintaining the trust of visitors. This will be paramount to sites that depend on consumer commerce. The concept of trust is crucial because it affects a number of factors essential to online transactions, including security and privacy. Without trust, development of e-commerce cannot reach its potential. The factors that produce a sense of trustworthiness need to be identified, in their entirety. Their interactions need to be understood, and their relative importance determined. Understanding the roles of these different factors would allow online retailers to ease consumers' concerns, and could hasten the maturation of Web retailing. With this in mind, Cheskin and Studio Archetype initiated a study to identify the factors that produce a sense of trustworthiness. The research and analysis of the study identified six fundamental factors that communicate trustworthiness: Brand: the importance of the company's reputation in the choice to do business with them. Navigation: the ease of finding what the user seeks. Fulfillment: the process the user experiences from the time a purchase process is initiated until the purchase is received to the user's satisfaction. Presentation: ways in which the appearance of the site, in and of itself, communicates meaningful information. Technology: ways in which the site technically functions. Seals of Approval: symbols that represent the companies that specialize in assuring the safety of Web sites. The factors above are the defining elements of the model created by both organizations for the benefit of any company developing e-commerce Web sites. The six factors break down into a total of 28 different "building blocks" in which trustworthiness may be established. One finding of the study was that nine of the 28 building blocks have to do with third-party endorsement of some kind. The building blocks are explained in detail in the study.