The impact of collaborative commerce and trust in Web services

The Internet has accelerated the adoption of collaborative commerce among businesses to form Web services. Web services refer to modular Internet‐based business functions that perform specific business tasks to facilitate business interactions within and beyond the organization. Firms are embedded in networks of collaborative relationships that influence the flow of resources among the stakeholders (requesters, providers, users and employees). Collaboration with Web services creates trust in the technological dimensions of Web services. Technology trust refers to the subjective probability by which organizations believe that the underlying technology infrastructure is capable of facilitating transactions according to their confident expectations. In this paper we examine the role of facilitating conditions in technology trust and its relationship with Web services. We provide a set of guidelines for early adopters and discuss the theoretical and practical implications of Web services and directions for future research.