How to break the market power of digital pioneers: Design principles for building trust in e-commerce

Abstract

Market power in electronic marketplaces is increasingly developing into a monopoly. Digital pioneers like Amazon and eBay do not want to give up their market share easily. Especially, Small and Medium Enterprises, which try to offer their services online, have great difficulties to gain market share. To understand the causes, we start a systematic literature review. The results shows that building trust is a necessary precondition for success in e-commerce. For many small and medium-sized companies, entering e-commerce market is a completely new business field. Therefore, they lack the knowledge and experience to successfully build online trust. To solve this problem, we use Design Science Research approach and develop a Trust Guide for online trust building. The Trust Guide is a set of design principles derived from trust theories. Our aim is to give Small and Medium Enterprises practical guidance and help them to successfully build online trust in e-commerce.