مدلسازی و آزمایش ابعاد اعتماد مصرف کننده در تجارت الکترونیک Modelling and testing consumer trust dimensions in e-commerce

1. Introduction E-commerce transactions are the sales of products and services over the Internet, which in the past years have been growing tremendously. Nevertheless, E-commerce is still a relatively new concept for most people, and as trust increases with familiarity, it is important to find ways to encourage consumers to continuously use e-commerce (Jones & Leonard, 2008; W.-T. Wang, Wang, & Liu, 2016). Eurostat study reveals that in 2013, 38% of the European Union population (individuals aged between 16 to 74 years’ old, from all 28 countries) have ordered or bought goods or services for private use on the Internet. However large discrepancies exist among these 28 countries (OECD, 2013). Whereas in Germany 60% of the population (with the same characteristics) purchases online, and 57% in Sweden, the figure stands at just 15% in Portugal. Electronic commerce typically lacks human warmth (Hassanein & Head, 2007; Lu, Fan, & Zhou, 2016) and lack of trust is one of the most frequently cited reasons why consumers do not purchase from Internet vendors (Grabner-Krauter & Kaluscha, 2003; D. J. Kim, Yim, Sugumaran, & Rao, 2015; J.-M. Lee & Rha, 2016). Moreover, recent studies have also addressed trust from the perspective of its different relationships (Söllner, Hoffmann, & Leimeister, 2015) and how privacy assurance and concerns affect trust (Aïmeur, Lawani, & Dalkir, 2016; Bansal, Zahedi, & Gefen, 2015). However, a research question still remains to be answered: Does overall trust significantly influence consumers’ intention to purchase online? With this in mind, this study’s objective is to focus on the Portuguese scenario and consumers with regard to their trust and their intent to purchase online. The two main advantages of choosing Portugal and its consumers is the lack of existing literature regarding e-commerce in Portugal, and also the big potential for improvement and for increasing the Portuguese online market, as the number of internet users, online buyers, the average amount of money spent per purchase and the volume of e-commerce business has been growing since 2009 and are predicted to continue doing so at least until 2017 (IDC & ACEPI, 2013; Netsonda & ACEPI, 2014).