Trust in Online Shopping: The Korean Student Experience

E-commerce has become an important part of business. In South Korea, the market size of online shopping malls was 13,460 billion Korean Won in 2006, and this figure keeps growing. Thus, gaining loyal customers has become a rising concern. In this study, we adopted Lewicki and Bunker´s three different types of trust, namely, calculus-based trust, knowledge-based trust, and identification-based trust, in order to investigate their hierarchical relationships in e-commerce and their impacts on customer satisfaction and loyalty. A total of 104 responses from university students were analyzed to test the proposed model and its hypotheses using PLS. The results showed that hierarchical relationships between different types of trust exist in the online environment, and among them, knowledge-based trust has the strongest impact on customer satisfaction. This finding implied that practitioners should focus on developing an appropriate online strategy in terms of how to build up trust-based relationships with online customers.