Social word of mouth: How trust develops in the market

Nick Hajli, Xiaolin Lin, Mauricio Featherman and Yichuan Wang

Consumer trust is essential for a business to successfully promote new products and services. This paper develops a trust model from a social commerce perspective by investigating the influence of social commerce constructs on consumer trust in new products and services.

Social word of mouth: How trust develops in the market

Nick Hajli

Newcastle University Business School

Xiaolin Lin

Washington State University

Mauricio Featherman

Washington State University

Yichuan Wang

Auburn University

Introduction

Trust plays a central role in helping consumers make purchasing decisions in an e-commerce context (Gefen 2000; McKnight et al.2002; Jones & Leonard 2008). Increased degrees of trust in a vendor make it more likely to encourage consumer inquiries and boost intention to purchase products from that vendor’s websites (Gefen 2000; Hajli 2013b). On the other hand, with little trust, consumers often hesitate to purchase from a...

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