Trust and Satisfaction, Two Stepping Stones for Successful E-Commerce Relationships: A Longitudinal Exploration

Trust and satisfaction are essential ingredients for successful business relationships in business-to-consumer electronic commerce. Yet there is little research on trust and satisfaction in e-commerce that takes a longitudinal approach. Drawing on three primary bodies of literature, the theory of re...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: KIM, Dan J., FERRIN, Donald L., RAO, H. Raghav
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2008
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/1145
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/lkcsb_research/article/2144/viewcontent/Trust_and_Satisfaction_Two_Stepping_Stones_av.pdf
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Institution: Singapore Management University
Language: English
Description
Summary:Trust and satisfaction are essential ingredients for successful business relationships in business-to-consumer electronic commerce. Yet there is little research on trust and satisfaction in e-commerce that takes a longitudinal approach. Drawing on three primary bodies of literature, the theory of reasoned action, the extended valence framework, and expectation-confirmation theory, this study synthesizes a model of consumer trust and satisfaction in the context of e-commerce. The model considers not only how consumers formulate their prepurchase decisions, but also how they form their long-term relationships with the same website vendor by comparing their prepurchase expectations to their actual purchase outcome. The results indicate that trust directly and indirectly affects a consumer's purchase decision in combination with perceived risk and perceived benefit, and also that trust has a longer term impact on consumer e-loyalty through satisfaction. Thus, this study extends our understanding of consumer Internet transaction behavior as a three-fold (prepurchase, purchase, and postpurchase) process, and it recognizes the crucial, multiple roles that trust plays in this process. Implications for theory and practice as well as limitations and future directions are discussed.