What are buyers looking at : an empirical study of antecedents of online trust in consumer-to-consumer market

Abstract

While the consumer-to-consumer electronic commerce has been flourishing these years, the number of online buyers who complain and retreat has also been growing. Increasingly, buyers concern about being cheated and suffering loss due to the transaction. Thus, this study aims to investigate the antecedents for buyer’s online trust during the initial buyer-seller interaction process in C2C market. Facing the vagueness in literature, online trust in C2C context in this study is clearly defined as being held towards the online seller rather than the online auction platform. With this definition, the research model is developed. Platform characteristics are identified to have effect on buyer’s perception of system capability; while seller characteristics are introduced to affect perception of seller capability. The two perceptions further make impact on online trust, both moderated by buyer’s propensity to trust. Based on this model, a set of hypotheses are proposed and empirically tested with collected data. Results show a general support of the hypotheses. Finally, the implications and limitations of this study are discussed.