Role of trust in e‐business success

Success of an e‐business rests on many factors. One of the important contributors is trust. Trust is something that an e‐business must strive to achieve over a period of time. Acquiring customer trust depends on many things that an e‐business controls. However, customer's trust as such is not under the control of the e‐business. Some contributing factors for gaining customer trust are: appeal of the Web site, product or service offerings, branding, quality of service and trusted seals. Trust can be viewed from many angles such as transaction, information content, product, technology and institution. This paper analyses the role of trust from the transaction perspective and highlights the things that an e‐business could do for building customer trust.