Trust and e-commerce

The ongoing digitization of sales processes causes the revolutionizing of entire industries - including the retail business. E-commerce offers customers convenience, communities, and an almost unlimited variety of products. At the same time, e-commerce deprives customers of opportunities to check products and providers beforehand. This raises the question of whether the establishment of a live Chat may be able to boost consumers' confidence in an e-commerce provider and reduce perceived risks, thus increasing their purchase intention. The study is based on an experiment in which a total 93 subjects were divided into two groups, of which one was shown a website with a live chat, and the other one the same website but without a live chat. The subjects were then directed to a questionnaire with “social presence” as an independent variable and “purchase intention”, “trust”, and “perceived risk” as dependent variables. The answers were analyzed to determine the moderating effect of experience with the Internet and e-commerce as well as the effect of the variables on each other. The results show that social presence is highly significant for purchase intention, trust, and perceived risk and that the linear relationships between the variables are significant to highly significant. The availability of a live chat was found to have a positive effect on social presence which was highly significant when comparing the experimental and the control groups. Purchase intent, trust, and perceived risk, on the other hand, are not directly affected by a live chat per se. Through the change in social presence, however, a live chat indirectly leads to a significant positive change in the trust of the experimental group, influenced by the perceived risk