The role of trust in online shopping: A hierarchical relationship perspective

온라인 쇼핑에서 신뢰의 역할 - 위계적 관계 관점

Nowadays, online shopping has become popular among consumers. As such, gaining loyal online shopping customers has become a rising concern for online shopping vendors. In this study, we investigated the hierarchical relationships among Lewicki and Bunker's three different types of trust, namely, calculus-based trust, knowledge-based trust, and identification-based trust, in the context of online shopping and their impacts on customer satisfaction and loyalty. A total of 104 responses from online shopping users were analyzed to test the proposed model and its hypotheses using Partial Least Squares (PLS). The results showed that, in the online environment, hierarchical relationships between different types of trust exist and that, among them, knowledge-based trust has the strongest impact on customer satisfaction. This finding implied that practitioners should focus on developing appropriate online strategies for building trust-based relationships with online customers.