Trust and relationship building in electronic commerce

Abstract

In e‐commerce, trust becomes an essential prerequisite for customer relationship building. Drawn from established theoretical work on trust and relationship marketing, a model is proposed aiming to help in highlighting the differences between traditional and e‐commerce and to facilitate thinking as to how trust can be built in virtual environments. Conceptualized in the context of an electronic servicescape, the model helps to demonstrate how agent and virtual reality technologies can facilitate the expressiveness required for the formation of trust through iterative interaction with promises being made, enabled and fulfilled.