Validating the Relationship between Information Quality and Trust: The Moderating Effect from Customer Orientation

The Internet has grown extremely fast and given birth to E-taling, a new and popular way to sell goods online. Developing a trustworthy environment to generate customer trust is a powerful tool to sustain customer loyalty for E-tailers. This research proposes and validates the importance of information quality and customer orientation in website design on trust-building. More importantly, our research model suggests that customer orientation not only has a direct effect on online trust, but also moderates the relationship between information quality and trust. An laboratory experiment was setup and a large-scale survey was conducted to test our research model and proposed hypotheses. Results support our hypotheses. Managerial and theoretical implications are discussed.