Trust in online and offline environments

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Trust is considered a key variable in long-term relationships that has acquired great relevance in the field of marketing and sales, since it is a fundamental factor for the success of commercial transactions.

With the advent of the Internet and its subsequent generalisation, significant growth in e-commerce was expected, but this has been partially slowed down by the lack of consumer confidence. This situation has led to the need to study factors that allow for strengthening confidence through the Internet.

In traditional channels, salespeople continue to play an important role in generating trust, as they are the people who contact customers, but in virtual environments this role has disappeared, a situation that has led to research into the implications.

Concept of trust, relevance in traditional and online environments and dimensions. We have found publications in multiple fields such as economics, psychology, philosophy or marketing without reaching a consensus on its definition.

From the marketing field, it is considered one of the key all mobile company name list in world with country variables in marketing relationships. Moorman, Deshpandé and Zaltman (1993) define it as: "the willingness to trust the other party in the exchange in which one trusts." Trust is considered a dynamic concept that evolves over time, forming in the minds of consumers based on the characteristics of the company and its behavior.

This concept plays a key role in the field of sales, as multiple studies claim that in order to achieve customer loyalty, it is necessary to first gain their trust. Furthermore, trust allows people to live in complex situations, reducing the number of options to consider in a given situation, allowing cooperation between people, which is therefore key to the success of transactions, i.e. in the buying and selling process.

One of the key agents for generating trust in traditional channels is the seller. We can distinguish between seller-centred trust and organisation-centred trust. Trust in the seller leads to a favourable attitude towards the point of sale and influences the intention to repurchase. In addition, there is an effect of reciprocal trust transfer between the seller and the point of sale. However, with the development of new technologies in e-commerce, these actors have disappeared.

Thus, electronic commerce has encountered different difficulties for its development, with the lack of trust being considered one of the main obstacles to its growth. The literature has paid attention to the factors that cause this distrust, such as the lack of knowledge on the part of consumers of the agents that act on the Internet, as well as the medium through which it is carried out, the lack of confidence in terms of commercial honesty and the competition of companies on the Internet, the possibility that partners are located in different or even unknown places, with different regulations and the concern about the security of online payments and the lack of privacy policies.


Some authors have even claimed that "the role of trust is more important in electronic transactions than in traditional ones", the relevance of this concept in online sales being such that it is considered the central aspect of electronic commerce.