First, not all studies have found a significant relationship between trust and satisfac-
tion. In a study of apparel retailers, Kim and Stoehl (2004) proposed trust (operationalized as safety of personal information and transactions, and viewed as a component of overall website quality) as an antecedent of satisfaction; however, the relationship was nonsignif- icant. In their study, only female consumers were surveyed, with respondents questioned regarding the online retailer they had visited most often in the past year. This was intentionally done so that firmer opinions of the site would have formed, based on the view that non frequent shoppers may not have formed a solid or accurate impression of site features. It is possible that this decision could have built bias into the study, in that regular purchasers may have already achieved a base level of trust or satisfaction in their selected site. Further, studies based on a respondent’s recollection of his/her perceptions of a site used at some point in the past may yield different results from a survey administered at the actual time of interaction with the site.