Discussion

The volume of e-commerce is increasing sharply, although this new way of shopping has not yet been adopted by all consumers. The reasons for shopping from web stores include their ease of use, lower price level and better selection of products available, compared to that in regular stores. The main reasons for choosing a particular web store were the less expensive prices and the large selection of products. Familiarity of the brand was also important, though slightly less so. However, there are also reasons for not shopping through the Internet. Lack of trust in e-commerce is one factor affecting this decision.

Several factors contribute to consumers' trust in e-commerce, which can be defined as users' belief in its competence, dependability and security under conditions of risk (Kini and Choobineh, 1998) or willingness to risk time, money or personal data (Nielsen, 2002). Familiarity and trust seem to go hand in hand in e-commerce, as well as in more general concerns of trust (e.g., Luhmann, 1979). Familiarity has been represented by well-known brands (Cheskin Research, 1999) or by domestic web stores (Uusmedia kuluttajan silmin, 1998), as also in this pilot. The participants of this pilot study considered as trustworthy online shops that they were already familiar with from earlier experiences of ordinary shopping. Seventy-eight percent of the participants seemed to rely firmly on domestic online shops. Most of them preferred to order from domestic online shops even when they had expensive prices or a limited range of products compared to foreign web stores. On the other hand, the participants with good online skills were not markedly negative towards foreign online shops.

Previous studies have revealed controversial relationships between the user's Internet skills and trust in e-commerce. Jarvenpaa and Tractinsky (1999) and Hoffman et al. (1999) found greater online proficiency to be associated with more critical perceptions regarding security and privacy and higher expectations of risk. Instead, Miyazaki and Fernandez (2001) found more abundant Internet experience to be connected with lower expectations of risk with regard to online shopping. However, their study showed even the heavy users of Internet to be concerned about privacy questions. In this pilot, no support for the aforementioned statements emerged, as some of the participants with good online skills were more confident about using web stores. This may suggest that the reputation of Internet or online shops is not equally good among non-users as among those familiar with them. Technical facts about e-commerce are hard to understand and this provokes uncertainty. Technical expertise is a prerequisite for having a solid opinion about the safety of e-commerce (Konrad, Fuchs and Barthel, 1999).

Good usability of a website can be taken as an indicator of quality, which, in turn, indicates the dealer's competence, a prediction of trust in e-commerce environment. ISO 9126-1 (2001) includes usability in the software engineering product quality model. Firmness, functionality, convenience and representational delight contribute to websites' quality (Kim, Lee, Han and Lee, 2002) and ease of use has been found to contribute to their credibility, which is one attribute of a trustworthy entity (Fogg et al., 2001). The respondents of the pilot study reported here found a well managed and easy-to-use website the most important feature of a high-standard web store. In addition to this, the characteristics of a trustworthy online shop were short delivery times and reasonable prices. As important attributes of an online shop, the respondents mentioned high-quality pictures of the products, detailed terms of delivery, information concerning the products and service fees, address and delivery times. However, we ask the reader to bear in mind that the respondents were presented a set of choices instead of letting the responses emerge from the participants themselves. The results thus confirm the importance of previously discovered attributes, but the approach did not allow the new attributes to emerge.

There are many aspects that may be important with respect to trust in e-commerce: easy navigation, adequate product information, details about the fulfillment of the purchase process — completion, cancellation and refund, signs of security technology used and, finally, the brand (Cheskin Research, 1999). These qualities fit with the definition of e-commerce trust as an individual's belief in the competence, dependability and security of the system under conditions of risk (Kini and Choobineh, 1998).

Lack of security has been noticed to strongly provoke mistrust in e-commerce. Credit card payment (Hirvasniemi et al.), security and privacy (Hoffman et al., 1999) have been mentioned in earlier studies. The results of our pilot study indicate that negative perceptions regarding the trustworthiness of online shops culminated in issues about security with purchasing on the web. Nearly 90% of respondents would refuse to disclose their credit card number when shopping online. Perhaps in addition to the genuine unease with security issues, the picture given by the mass media about the security of the Internet may evoke such strong attitudes concerning online credit card purchases.