Online shopping or e-commerce is developed rapidly and has a gigantic impact in globalization. Many consumers around the world start to trade products or do business using this system. The most crucial factor for consumer who shops online is trust. Grabner-Kraeuter (1989 p.43) states “Trust can serve as mechanism to reduce the complexity of human conduct in situations where people have to cope with uncertainty”. This paper tries to analyze that which method can be use by online merchants to increase their consumer trust. Various action and tools are introduced to increasing customers’ trust and verify the website information. Amazon.com is chosen to be the case study. The reason behind this is the popularity and reliability of the website and it is ranked in the top30 website in the world.
Introduction
Figure: E-commerce market size from 2004 to 2014
Source: Euromonitor, International Telecommunication Union; A.T. Kearney analysis
E-commerce is now widely used and has a huge impact in globalization
The graph above shows the upward trend of e-commerce market size which increasing respectively since 2004 and from now on the trend is also estimated to be rising due to the benefits of it. There are significant reasons behind that why majority of people use this method of trading.
First of all, consumers can trade goods easier than by traditional shopping. Consumers can obviously gain convenience when they shop online since they can purchase or sell products without driving to their favorite stores. Buyers can effortlessly visit online shopping websites such as eBay, amazon etc. and then search for the product and finally purchase it by using online transaction. Secondly, most of the prices in online shopping websites are much lower than traditional shopping because the website’s owners need to decrease their profit margin to attract and get more consumers. For example, online merchant needs to discount the price of products to promote the
Bibliography: Anderson, R. E., & Srinivasan, S. S. (2003). E‐satisfaction and e‐loyalty: A contingency framework. Psychology & marketing, 20(2), 123-138. Grabner-Kraeuter, S. (2002). The role of consumers ' trust in online-shopping. Journal of Business Ethics, 39(1-2), 43-50. Hong, I. B., & Cha, H. S. (2013). The mediating role of consumer trust in an online merchant in predicting purchase intention. International Journal of Information Management, 33(6), 927-939. Hosmer, L. T. (1995). Trust: The connecting link between organizational theory and philosophical ethics. Academy of management Review, 20(2), 379-403. Information from Amazon.com homepage, http://www.amazon.com. Accessed 2014-08-10. San Martín, S., & Camarero, C. (2009). How perceived risk affects online buying. Online Information Review, 33(4), 629-654. Tan, S. J. (1999). Strategies for reducing consumers’ risk aversion in Internet shopping. Journal of Consumer Marketing, 16(2), 163-180.