The Effect of Social Cues and Informational Cues on Consumers’ Trust and Trust Performance

Abstract

Social commerce is a booming trend in Indonesia; even though this phenomenon is quite new many sellers use social media to sell their products due to low risk and low set-up costs associated to this business Social media is the biggest network that connects people; it is thus a huge opportunity for s-commerce sellers to take advantage and capture potential buyers’ attention In this research we focus on the most used social media Facebook which has 1 3 billion active users Analyzed are 3 key elements on Facebook: picture rating (shares & likes) and information We classified these 3 key elements into 2 cues; first is informational cues which include visual presentation and information quality and second is social cues which include recommendation ratings and buyer seller interactions We want to examine the effect of these cues on consumers' perceived trust Many studies have proved that trusting belief with a seller is the most important factor that influences consumers' intention to purchase or use word of mouth Trust is abstract and has many definitions; therefore we chose benevolence and credibility as dimensions of trust that would be suitable for our model After conducting survey research and analyzing the responses collected we found that information quality is the most significant factor that influences seller's benevolence and credibility; visual presentation quality and recommendation rating are influenced by seller's credibility but not influence seller's credibility Lastly buyer-seller interaction is positively related to seller's benevolence but not to seller's credibility

Date of Award	2015 Feb 12
Original language	English
Supervisor	Jeng-Chung Chen (Supervisor)