Building Customer Trust in e-commerce: A Study on Buyers’ Adoption and Usage Intent in Rwanda

Abstract

E-commerce is gaining popularity due to its importance for both merchants and consumers, particularly in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, which restricts mass movement and gathering, as well as the high costs associated with traveling to different markets. Despite mounting evidence demonstrating the importance of internet in retails business, little is known about the potential mechanisms that increase consumer purchasing intentions when using online shopping platforms. In today's high customer sensitivity to service quality, successful entrepreneurs have recently thrived under competitive pressures. Online transactions are more difficult because buyers and sellers do not know each other, yet they must provide financial information to intermediaries. Thus, it is now clear that increasing customer trust is a viable strategy for driving e-business success today. Considering this, a new model demonstrating a potential mechanism that increases customers' trust in intermediaries and thus leads to their online purchasing intentions was developed. This innovative model connects website quality to the online purchasing intentions of the customers, using trust in intermediaries as a mediator and moderating the effect of perceived usefulness. To prove or disprove the assumptions highlighted in this study, a cross-sectional research design was used with data from 568 clients of nine domestic e-commerce platforms operating in Rwanda. To investigate the relationship between the variables hypothesized in this study, a variety of methods and tools were used. To assess the potential effect of each variable in this model, we used CFA in SEM-Amos, mean and standard deviation in SPSS, and Hayes macro process. The overall results obtained using the various techniques specified supported the current hypothesized model. We believe that the current study provided an innovative and useful mechanism as one of the potential solutions for today's merging online businesses.