Does your website generate Trust?

( Source: Amazon.co.uk web page)

Trust and trustworthiness

Tullberg (2008) reviewed that two components of trust are trustfulness and trustworthiness; trustworthiness determines the increase or decrease of trust. Other researcher argued that trust is focused on an individual’s enthusiasm to entrust, to do something where the support of other people is important for results; trustworthiness is more likely related to the individual’s capability to interact with others and create the reliable information for the group as a whole ( Bolton, et 2008).

Most scholars in marketing research draw upon a belief-based conceptualization of trust that it is perceived from trustworthiness (Gefen 2003 cited in Buttner and Goritz 2008: 39). Researches prove the higher the perceived trustworthiness; the more likely visitors are to buy from the web-site. In addition an increase in perceived risk lowers the intention to buy, which is partially influenced by reducing the perceived trustworthiness of the web-site.

According to Wood (2006), an interesting viewpoint about trustworthiness is that the proponents of the neuro-linguitic programming (NLP), which is a human communication theory, suggests that building rapport is solely dependent on the communication process and not the content. In reality, this means that buyers (the receiver) from a football club’s website, for instance, will develop confidence and trust in the virtual store because of their perception of the owners of the website (the sender) and not necessarily due to what is said on the website (the content).

How to be trustworthy

According to Mayer (cited in Buttner and Goritz 2008:36) trust is a perceived trustworthiness. In order to gain trustworthiness three main functions have to be performed by a web-site:

- Ability to fulfil given promises
- To be interested in consumers well-being
- To follow a set of desirable principles.

To put differently other scholars were of the opinion that there are four determinants of a trustworthiness of a web-site: viz-a-vis usefulness, competence, integrity, reputation (Miller 2008). Our analysis of these determinants will be based on the use of Manchester United web-site layout:

· Usefulness
The website has a variety of high quality products to offer, however, it would be much better to have forums or product's comments for new visitors to know more about the information of the products.

· Competence
Since Miller (2008) admitted in his research that most users are likely to look for positive cues that signal a professionally designed website which tends to improve the sites trustworthiness. Thus, in case of this football club website, let’s look at the typography; there are some positive and negative cues. For example, the red colour is likely to appeal and arouse visitors’ positive emotions which influence his / her decision to spend more time on the site. However, the amount of words and texts seem to confuse the viewers.
· Integrity
In order to test the integrity for the trustworthiness, Beatty (2008) raised a question for the site: 'Does the website exhibit honesty, ethical behaviour?'. That means whether the site addresses information about security, privacy concerns and identity disclosure or not. In case of the Manchester website, the layout showed the VeriSign services and the security confirmation. It raises the level of customers’ trustworthiness. Another good aspect of Manchester United online store is that its merchandise is licensed and provides high level of customer care.

· Reputation
Manchester United is a well-known football club, the reputation is already established and the image of this club speaks for itself. That is why the website has strong credibility which is enhanced with the front page layout. To buttress the point, the image of the world best footballer of the year 2008, Cristiano Ronaldo, is displayed and this therefore increases the chances that visitors of the website will turn into potential buyers.



The level of Trustworthiness

According to the research of Charkrboty and Charkrboty (2007), the level of worthiness will be not at all, below moderate, moderate, somewhat and fully trustworthy.

In the research, they found that:

· If the advertising rate, customers’ satisfaction, after-sales services, price and quality and technical know-how are average then the website could be said not to be trustworthy.

· If the advertising rate, customers’ satisfaction, after-sales services, price and quality and technical knowhow are good, then the website could be counted trustworthy.


· If the advertising rate, customers’ satisfaction, after-sales services, price and quality and technical knowhow are fair, then the trustworthiness level could be said to be fair as well.

References

Tullberg, J (2008) ‘Trust- the importance of trustfullness versus trustworthiness’, the journal of Socio-Economics ,37 (5), 2059-2071

Bolton, Gary; Loebecke, Claudia; Ockenfels, Axel ( 2008) ‘Does Competition Promote Trust and Trustworthiness in Online Trading? An Experimental Study.’ Journal of Management Information Systems, 25 (2), 145-169

Chakraborty, C and Chakraborty, D (2007), Fuzzy rule base for consumer trustworthiness in Internet Marketing: An interactive fuzzy rule classification approach, Intelligent Data Analysis, 11(4), 339-353

Wood and Andy, J (2006), NLP revisited: nonverbal communications and signals of trustworthiness.Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, 26 (2),197-204

Ofuonye,E, Beatty,P, Reay,I, Dick,S, Miller J (2008), How do we build trust into E-commerce websites?Journal of E-commerce, 25(5), 7-9

Buttner, Oliver, B; Goritz and Anja, S (2008), Perceived trustworthiness of online shops... Journal of Consumer Behaviour, 7(1), 35-50