Exploring the Factors Affecting Online Trust in B2C E-Commerce Transactions in India: an Empirical Study

Purpose: The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a surge in e-commerce as millions of people were forced to stay at home and adopt digital channels for their purchases to avoid crowded supermarkets. It made the whole world look towards e-commerce as a one-stop solution for keeping markets alive. However, it came as an opportunity for digital fraudsters as a huge number of digital frauds were reported during this pandemic. Such incidents raised questions about online trust-related issues. Fake websites, insecure payment mechanisms, data theft, privacy breach, product reliability, etc., are a few of the reasons why many people are still not confident about using e-commerce platforms. When customers cannot physically touch, feel, and see the products, it becomes even more suspicious and raises serious uncertainty about the quality of the promised product and transaction setup in the e-commerce framework.   Design/Methodology/Approch: In this study, primary data was collected through structured questionnaires from e-commerce website users belonging to Generation Z and analyzed using Structural Equation Modelling and Path Analysis in IBM SPSS AMOS version 24.   Findings: Online Security, Online Privacy, and Website appearance were studied and found to have a significant positive impact on online trust. Online trust was also found to be a predictor of purchase intention. Online trust was also found to act as a full mediator between online security and purchase intention, online privacy, and purchase intention, and as a partial mediator between website appearance and purchase intention.   Research, Practical & Social Implications: The cross-sectional nature of this study makes it difficult for making inferences about causal relationships so new studies can adopt and check the utility of a longitudinal approach in this area. Furthermore, the data collected using convenience sampling had all young generation respondents, mostly college/university students. This current study takes only three antecedents of online trust with reference to a young generation; an exploratory study is needed here to find out new possible antecedents of developing online trust. Moreover, the appearance of the website is altogether a vast area to investigate for further development; very limited dimensions of the appearance of e-commerce websites are covered in this study.