On the impact of virtual environment in trust building: E-commerce perspective

Virtual Reality is an important aspect of the state-of-art technologies. The emerging trend to integrate the highest level of interactivity in the computer-oriented activities like web pages has introduced a new dimension in various aspects of computer-oriented services. Electronic commerce (e-commerce) is such a sector, which may be greatly facilitated with the touch of interactive virtual reality or virtual environment. This research mainly aims to develop a trust establishment model for electronic commerce activities. This paper focuses on the usability of virtual reality and virtual environments in establishing trust in electronic commerce and related issues. We perform an extensive analysis on the current electronic commerce infrastructure and evaluate the effectiveness of virtual environment from the point of view of customer relationship management, trust-worthiness and customer satisfaction. An effective framework of integrating virtual reality with e-commerce is also presented in this paper. This paper also investigates the applicability of virtual reality and virtual environment for trust management in online shopping. The prime contribution of this paper is, it proposes an effective trust-building model to enhance the customer-seller relationship in e-commerce and provides a robust framework for the same. A survey has also been conducted evaluating the acceptability of proposed framework. Comprehensive recommendations on e-commerce-trust formation model in developing countries and its prospects and constraints are provided in this paper too.