Pilot Study

In order to explore the ideas presented in theoretical literature in the light of empirical data, a pilot questionnaire survey was carried out. The questions were about the following themes:

• Respondent's background information (e.g., gender, age, education)

• Frequency of Internet use and Internet skills

• Use of mail ordering and online shops (reasons for using or non-using)

• Online shops that the respondent remembers/has used

• Frequency of using online shops

• Most common purchases on the web

• Amount of money spent by the respondent on these purchases

• Features that the participant prefers to include in the e-commerce sites (multiple-choice question)

• Features that make an online shop reliable from the participants' view point

These themes aimed at providing data about people's e-commerce usage, and their perceptions of e-commerce's reliability. The non-users of e-commerce were asked about the reasons for not shopping online and their willingness to use e-commerce in the near future. As mail order is popular in Finland, it was found important to discover the perceived differences between use of mail order and online shopping. The questionnaire consisted of 40 questions, many of them open-ended, to elicit the participants' authentic opinions.

Sixty-seven questionnaires were handed out and filled in by randomly selected people in the city centre of Oulu (the railway station and parks) and on the University of Oulu campus during the summer of 2002. The sample of respondents may have been biased towards students due to the large number of post-secondary schools in Oulu and the university with approximately 14,000 students. Another critical note should be made about the insufficient number of middle-aged participants, especially middle-aged men. It seemed that the persons most interested and eager to participate in the study were young people, students and female, whereas older people were not enthusiastic to participate. The places where the questionnaires were handed out may also have influenced the number of young students among the study participants, although they were chosen in a way to allow the researchers to reach all kinds of people. Taking into account these facts, the results must be assessed critically. The results are not statistically significant, but they do give an idea of consumers' perceptions of trust in e-commerce that should be further examined in future studies.