Investigating the Formation of Trust in E-Commerce Relationships

As customer relationships constitute an important new asset category for the digital economy organization, the role of trust becomes vital for establishing and maintaining successful relational exchanges between the business and the consumer. Drawing from established theoretical work on trust and relationship marketing, a series of trust constructs and trust-building processes are synthesized to propose a framework for the formation of trust in customer-business relationships. The framework is conceptualized in the context of an electronic servicescape, where trust is formed through iterative interactions with promises being made, enabled and fulfilled. This research-in-progress paper concludes by describing the research approach for empirically validating the depicted relationships.

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