Understanding Consumer Trust in Online Purchase Processes: An Experimental Investigation

Consumer dropouts during the purchase process represent a critical challenge in e-commerce. While many individuals use retailer websites mainly for product searches and information gathering, a significant number of online shoppers often abandon their shopping carts somewhere in their purchase process. Hence, it is essential to investigate the customer’s exit from a website along a general purchase process longitudinally. Prior research has shown the lack of trust to be a critical obstacle inhibiting online transactions. However, few (if any) studies have examined the relationships between trust and consumer dropouts. This study investigates such relationships by a multi-stage online purchase process derived from a generic consumer decision process. We examine the trust-related considerations pertinent to each stage of the purchase process, with particular focus on prominent trust antecedents. Based on our analysis of the relationships between trust and consumer dropouts, we develop hypotheses specific to each purchase stage and empirically test them using the responses of 178 subjects who voluntarily participated in a controlled experiment. Overall, our results suggest that the customer dropout rate increases as the purchase process progresses, and that trust is more significant to the dropout decision in later stages of the purchase process.