Building consumer trust is important for new or unknown
Internet businesses seeking to extend their customer reach
globally. This study explores the question: Should website
designers take into account the cultural characteristics of
prospective customers to increase trust, given that different
trust-building web strategies have different cost implications?
In this study, we focused on two theoretically grounded
practical web strategies of customer endorsement, which
evokes unit grouping, and portal affiliation, which evokes
reputation categorization, and compared them across two
research sites: Australia (individualistic culture) and Hong
Kong (collectivistic culture). The results of the laboratory
experiment we conducted, on the website of an online bookstore, revealed that the impact of peer customer endorsements
on trust perceptions was stronger for subjects in Hong Kong
than Australia and that portal (Yahoo) affiliationwas effective
only in the Australian site. A follow-up study was conducted
as a conceptual replication, and provided additional insights
on the effects of customer endorsement versus firm affiliation
on trust-building. Together, these findings highlight the need
to consider cultural differences when identifying the mix of
web strategies to employ in Internet store websites