Introduction

Global e-commerce spending exceeded one trillion USD in 2002 (Salim, 2002). In the same year in Finland, spending in e-commerce was estimated to amount to nearly 900 million USD (Nurmela and Parjo, 2002) and this figure is increasing. The number of users of e-commerce in Finland grew from the year 2001 to 2002 by almost 50% among the population aged 15 to 74. Therefore, the factors affecting the use of e-commerce websites constitute a popular topic of research and according to Schoder and Yin (2000), "the recent proliferation of e-commerce has led to a great deal of analysis probing the who, what, where, when and whys of new opportunities for conducting business online and never before has our understanding of the customer been more intimate and extensive." Despite the growth of e-commerce, it is still developing and has not reached the majority of consumers.

E-commerce can be defined as selling products or services over the Internet.Basically, the idea of making a purchase from a distance, for example from one's home without being obliged to go to a shop, is not new. Mail order companies have been running similar businesses for a long time. To a certain degree, the Internet has actually only changed the media, replacing tangible product catalogues and order slips with web pages and electronic order forms. In addition, it has created different approaches to the payment transaction between the customer and the retailer. The mail usually still remains the delivery channel, with the exception of merchandise in an electronic format and groceries. Electronic products can be delivered via the Internet and groceries have been delivered as home deliveries, deliveries at the customer's workplace or at centralised, manned or unmanned pick-up points (Kallio, Saarinen and Tuunainen, 1997). The media and the technical platform may also have some potential for interesting and useful applications. For example, Lands End's "My Virtual Model" can augment e-shopping for clothes, because the customer can see how the clothes will look on the customer's body type (see Smith and Sivakumar, 2002).

Although e-commerce has partly replaced earlier mail ordering methods, at least in Finland mail-ordering and telemarketing are still more popular than e-shopping. In Nurmela and Parjo's study (2002), mail-ordering was used by 28% of Finns, telemarketing by 21% and e-commerce by only 10%. The lack of security and trust is considered the biggest barrier to the increase of business-to-consumer e-commerce. However, for business-to-business ecommerce, other issues have started to emerge as more important than for business-to-consumer e-commerce, such as business culture, staff competence and interoperability between e-commerce applications and legacy systems (CommerceNet Barriers to Electronic Commerce 2000 Study, 2000).

There are two rather common conceptions about e-commerce: credit card payments via the web are usually found untrustworthy, and people have a general mistrust toward e-commerce (Hoffmann, Novak and Peralta, 1999). Therefore, this chapter focuses on the question of whether these conceptions are supported empirically and whether site design has any impact on people's opinions of the trustworthiness of a given online shop. To investigate these things, the following research questions were formulated:

1. Which things are perceived to cause trust or mistrust towards buying from e-shops?

2. What kind of impact does the usability of online shops have on people's opinions of whether the online shop is trustworthy of not?

These issues are examined in the light of the theoretical literature and the empirical data of a pilot study conducted in Finland in 2002. In this pilot study, people from the street were selected randomly and asked about whether they had purchased from e-commerce websites or mail order catalogues, and what things caused them to trust the vendor in case they had bought something using either method of sale. Additionally, the perceived reasons for mistrust towards the vendor were identified.

The structure of the chapter is as follows: first, the definitions of trust are explored and the design issues related to trustworthy websites discussed. Furthermore, the results of an earlier usability study are reviewed because the results indicate some salient points related to the trustworthiness of e-commerce sites. After that, the results of the pilot study concerning trust and mistrust in e-shops are presented, discussed and compared with the results of previous studies. Finally, some ideas for new research in this area of trust in e-commerce are presented.