Research on Trust Issue of Current Chinese C2C E-commerce: Problems and Solutions

Nowadays, e-commerce industry has developed very rapidly in China. Despite current trading volume continuing to rise, China´s e-commerce now is faced with many challenges, among which trust is one of the biggest issues. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study on Taobao, which is the largest C2C e-commerce portal in Asia. According to our in-depth mining and analysis, we discovered several disadvantages within its trust model: trust fraud phenomenon is serious, trust dimensions prove insufficient, and Matthew effect is obvious, etc. Nowadays, almost all C2C e-commerce portals in China adopt similar trust models like Taobao. These problems are quite common. To solve the above problems, we propose several possible solutions to improve the trust model based on our research results. The general idea is to eliminate trust fraud by raising its cost, weaken the Matthew effect to the largest extent possible and promote the growth of small and medium-sized shops. This paper provides some valuable insights about Chinese C2C e-commerce and therefore the solutions proposed in this paper will have practical values for many e-commerce applications.