Purchasing online is considered risky, since customers lack direct contact with the company, i.e. through sales personnel or the physical store (Reichheld and Schefter, 2000), and have to hand over sensitive information, such as credit card numbers, in order to complete the transaction. The absence of interpersonal interaction also suggests that online trust is mainly cognitive, i.e. based on customers’ judgments of the reliability and capabilities of the merchant or the exchange channel, and not affective trust, i.e. founded on a bond among individuals (McAllister, 1995).
To date, there is a lack of empirical studies on trust in online exchanges (for a review, see Grabner-Krauter and Kalusha, 2003), and particularly on the effect of e-trust on customer behavior. Grabner-Krauter and Kalusha (2003) also point to a lack of studies on the trust in e-tailers, since many past studies have only investigated web site browsing, hypothetical purchasing scenarios, or internet banking.