Impression Formation of Websites and Trust

From Information Systems at Pitt Business

Electronic commerce is only initiated when a consumer feels some degree of trust with the given website. However, building this trust with the consumer is both difficult and problematic. How do consumers gather and form impressions of these online vendors and use these impressions to infer quality, its effect on trust and ultimately to decide whether or not to purchase from the store. By understanding how to minimize inherent risks associated with online commerce, online vendors would be better equipped to increase sales through by increasing their ability to increase trusting relations with their consumers.

This study creates and tests a theoretical model to assess the impression formation of a website by a consumer. Impressions of the website quality are reduced due to presentation flaws (poor style, incompleteness and errors), which in turn is predicted to predict trust with the store and ultimately intention to purchase from the given store. A study with 272 undergraduate students supported this model and also revealed that the actual amount of errors did not directly effect website quality, but was instead mediated by the perceived errors on the website.

[edit] Abstract

Although there has been a great deal of research on impression formation, little application of that research has been made to electronic commerce. A research model was constructed that hypothesized errors, poor style, and incompleteness to be inversely related to the users' level of perceived quality of an online store. Further, this perceived quality of the online store's Web site would be directly related to users' trust in the store and, ultimately, to users' intentions to purchase from the store. An experimental study with 272 undergraduate and graduate student volunteers supported all the hypotheses. In addition, it was found that the relationship between the factors and perceived quality was mediated by the perception of the flaws. The perception of flaws rather than the actual flaws influenced users' perception of quality. Supplemental analysis also seemed to indicate a pattern of diminishing effects with each subsequent flaw.

[edit] Paper Information

Authors: Andrea Everard, Dennis Galletta

To check out this paper How Presentation Flaws Affect Perceived Site Quality, Trust, and Intention to Purchase from an Online Store

This article was originally published in JMIS, Vol 22, No. 3, Winter 2005.

[edit] Keywords

Intention to purchase, trust in e-commerce, Web site credibility, Web site presentation flaws, Web site quality, Business to Business Electronic, Electronic Shopping, Internet Publishing and Broadcasting