Trustworthiness in E-commerce

Usability has often been sold as the silver bullet for solving the problems of unprofitable online stores. Although better usability will generally improve these sites and their potential for success, usability alone will not result in a highly thriving online presence. After all, no reasonable person will spend money at an untrustworthy online store no matter how usable and pretty the site may be. In this paper, we examine the multifaceted notions of trust and trustworthiness and how they can be applied to E-commerce stores. Trust in online stores strongly affects consumers' purchase decisions. While the majority of trust research lies in sociology and psychology, it is also relevant to E-commerce. We argue that high usability of an online store does not imply that the store is also trustworthy and, based on a theoretical discussion of trust, formulate a few design guidelines for designing for trust.