A Customer-Centric View of E-Commerce Security and Privacy

Business organizations have huge potential to increase their customer base by offering e-commerce services, especially in the post-pandemic era. Ensuring secure e-commerce applications plays an important role in increasing customer base. To develop appropriate policies and secure technological infrastructures, business organizations first need to establish an understanding of the reservations of their customers toward e-commerce, as well as their perception of security and privacy of e-commerce applications. In this paper, we present the results of an empirical study of e-commerce customers conducted in Pakistan to gain an insight into their mindset on using e-commerce applications. An online questionnaire was set up to collect data, which were analyzed using the partial least squares method with SmartPLS software. The empirical findings highlight that customers' concerns about credit card usage, concerns over information security, motivational factors for shopping offered by business organizations, customer trustworthiness, and user's feelings about the reputation of e-commerce impact their perception of security of online data and trust in an e-commerce application. The results of this study can help organizations in Pakistan to develop policies and improve technological infrastructures by adopting emerging technologies and digital forensics.