Are Media Cues Really a Key Driver towards Trust in Business to Consumer e-Commerce

Abstract

E-commerce B2C yet suffers from consumers’ lack of trust, and most of the research in e-commerce field focuses on how to build trust through cues that appeal to pursue consumers to do on-line purchasing. Since the nature of the Internet is lack of interpersonal exchanges that enhance trust behaviour, in this study we compared on-line consumers’ initial trust on four on-line vendors with the interpersonal cues of a person representing customer supports (Western photo, Saudi photo, Western video clip) and without photo through an extensive lab experiment. We found that the photograph and the video clip enhanced the initial trust than no photo and that the effect of the culture was stronger with Saudi than Western photo. Nevertheless, we presented many results that benefit the academic and the practitioner respectively.