Empirical Research on the Influencing Factors of Consumers' Trust Transfer from Offline to Online Channel

As the key to both offline and online business, consumers' trust to retailers always influences their purchase decision. In recent years, based on the traditional business, more and more click and mortar companies spring up. But could consumers' trust transfer from offline to online channel? And how? Extant researches lack deep exploration for these questions. In this study, introducing perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness as mediators, and taking perceived security and perceived compatibility into account, we build a research model. Then data are gathered by the method of questionnaire after online practice, and the model and hypotheses are tested by Structured Equation Model software. The research results show that: Firstly, consumers' trust to offline channel of a company, significantly positively affect their trust to its online channel, which finally influences their intention to purchase online, by the complete mediation of consumers' perceived usefulness of e-business websites; Secondly, consumers' perceived compatibility has positive effect on their trust to online business. But the effect of perceived ease of use and perceived security on consumers' trust to online business isn't significant.