Influencing factors of trust in consumer-to-consumer electronic commerce with gender and age

Even though consumer-to-consumer (C2C) electronic commerce (e-commerce) has been found to be more popular, mainstream scholarship tends to focus on B2C e-commerce area without making a distinction between C2C and B2C e-commerce. In this study, a trust model in C2C e-commerce was developed, which incorporates four perspectives, namely, (1) natural propensity to trust (NPT) as a personality perspective, (2) perception of website quality (PWSQ) as a website feature perspective, (3) other's trust of buyers/sellers (OTBS) as an interpersonal transaction perspective, and (4) third party recognition (TPR) as an institutional feature perspective. This study also investigated the role of gender and age toward trust in C2C e-commerce. The results show that PWSQ and TPR influenced trust in C2C e-commerce in general. However, as far as those who are 40's and older than 40's go, only OTBS might influence trust in C2C e-commerce. Therefore, we found that trust in C2C e-commerce can be moderated by age factor. Overall, the model helps to increase our understanding of trust in C2C e-commerce. In particular, a deep understanding of this can be very useful to determine those strategies and actions leading the Internet users to become real online purchasers. (c) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.