از اعضای جامعه مجازی تا خریداران تجارت الکترونیک C2C: اعتماد در جوامع مجازی و اثر آن بر قصد خرید مصرف کنندگان From virtual community members to C2C e-commerce buyers: Trust in virtual communities and its effect on consumers’ purchase intention

۱٫ Introduction Search and virtual communities are reliable underpinnings of consumer-to-consumer e-commerce. – Yanhong Li, CEO of Baidu.com, Inc. (Xu 2007) With the development of the Internet and Web 2.0, many new business models have emerged, among which are virtual communities (VCs). iResearch Consulting Group, an Internet marketing research firm in China, revealed that 45.3% of the country’s VCs emerged in 2007 (iResearch 2007b). In China, VCs have become the forums where Web users express themselves, get information, interact with each other, and establish their social networks. These VCs provide effective platforms for the development of e-commerce based on social networks (ESN), which refers to e-commerce based on the contents on and user base of VCs (iResearch 2008c). ESN, which involves transactions by VC members, is a new business trend emerging in China with the development of Web 2.0. Practitioners and researchers consider ESN promising for several reasons. First, the popularity of VCs in China makes ESN possible. VCs appeal to a large number of Web users because of their openness, interactivity, and the ability to connect many people with similar interests. This is evident in that there were more than 105 million VC users at the end of 2007 (iResearch 2008b). Second, VCs allow companies to more easily execute targeted marketing campaigns since VC forums usually attract individuals with similar interests and preferences. For example, notebook or automobile manufacturers can advertise their products in those VCs that focus on computers or cars, respectively. Finally, VCs enjoy a higher customer conversion rate than other business models, such as portals, service providers, and content providers. They also allow companies to increase customer loyalty (Bughin and Zeisser 2001, iResearch 2007b). Many companies that provide Internet services in China have already attempted to provide their existing VC users transaction functions such as buying and selling products and services or to enhance VC services for their existing transaction platforms. Consumer-to-consumer (C2C) e-commerce, the most successful ecommerce business model in China accounting for 93% of all Internet transactions in the second quarter of 2008, is one such example (iResearch 2008a). As Table 1 shows, there are four main C2C platforms in China, whose providers are Alibaba, TOM and eBay, Tencent, and Baidu, respectively. Taobao (provided by Alibaba) had the largest C2C market share (83.9%), followed by Eachnet (eBay China, 8.7%) and PaiPai (provided by Tencent, 7.4%) (CNNIC 2008). What is evident in Table 1 is that these major C2C providers all rely on VCs to promote member communication and knowledge sharing, which is a prominent characteristic of the Chinese e-commerce marketplace. In addition, these VCs help increase website stickiness and encourage VC members to participate in C2C transactions (iResearch 2007b). This is also evident in a case study Chen et al. (2007) conducted on Taobao and Eachnet, where they found that participation in online communities enhances customer loyalty to C2C websites. Though previous research has examined VCs in detail, no such research has empirically tested the link between VCs and C2C e-commerce. Due to the special e-commerce landscape in China and the emergence of ESN, it is important that we examine factors that affect this conversion process. For C2C platform providers, using VCs to facilitate members’ communication and converting VC members to C2C buyers and sellers are critical to their success. To achieve this goal, trust is a major issue that baffles C2C development in China as more than half of the offline-only consumers do not purchase online because of their distrust of the digital channel (Analysys 2008). For example, a large number of counterfeit products are sold on these websites (Fitzpatrick 2006, Wang 2009). Though some C2C websites such as Taobao and Youa have taken actions to prevent the sale of counterfeit products (B2B Trade International 2009, China Tech News 2006), the phenomenon still exists. Some C2C sellers post fake product pictures taken from magazines or other websites and send buyers inferior knockoff products. An informal survey by Sina.com revealed that more than 70% of the respondents had bought fake products online and worried about making purchases on C2C websites in the future (Sina 2009). Hence, we believe trust is especially important for the success of C2C websites in China. VCs are considered an effective way to overcome this obstacle for two reasons. First, VCs allow members to obtain information or support from each other. Many people go to VCs to search product-related information. They are influenced by the opinions of VC leaders and other members. A recent report shows that wordof-mouth marketing has great potential in VCs (iResearch 2007b). Second, VCs can be an effective medium to facilitate trust building in the digital marketplace. Ba (2001) used game theory to show that a community agent will be more effective than an individual agent in assuring the continuity of trust building processes because a community with an infinite life would overcome the limitation that an individual agent might cheat during the last transaction. She also proved that building trust at the community-level has lower costs than at the individual-level (Ba 2001). Hagel and Armstrong (1997) predicted that community-based transaction will be the future of community-based marketplace. In this research, we examine trust building in VCs provided by C2C websites and how it affects consumers’ intentions to get information and purchase from these websites. The main contributions of our research are relating VCs to C2C e-commerce and examining the conversion from VC members to C2C buyers. Here we focus on C2C buyers only as the factors that affect transaction behaviors may be different for buyers and sellers. Our research is motivated by the strong tie between VCs and C2C websites in China and the increasing popularity of ESN. We investigate the roles of familiarity and perceived similarity in building online interpersonal trust. These two factors were not examined in previous research on trust and VCs. We also decompose trust in the vendor or website into three constructs – ability, integrity, and benevolence – and study the relationships between these dimensions and trust in members. Neither of the two previous researches on trust in VCs examined these relationships. Our paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we first discuss the various definitions of VC and identify different types of VCs in China, then we review the extant literature on trust. Next, we propose the research model and explain in detail our hypotheses in Section 3. In Section 4, we discuss the research methodology including the processes of instrument development, data collection, and analysis, followed by the results, their implications, limitations, and suggestions for future work in Section 5. Finally, we conclude with Section 6.