A Trusted Approach to E-Commerce

It has been well documented that lack of trust between commercial entities and purchasers can restrict the potential of e-commerce. This may be because the purchaser is required to provide sensitive information to the commercial entity or because the purchaser may be suspicious that after payment has been processed, the goods purchased will not arrive. The challenge for the researcher is to determine the e-commerce model which maximizes the trust relationship. In this paper, we introduce a measure of the trust based on the information distributed to the parties in the transaction and isolate the instances which maximize trust for the purchaser. This leads us to propose four new models for e-commerce which would improve consumer trust and therefore likely lead to an increase in on-line commerce. We demonstrate that no new technologies are needed in order to implement these new models.