Online Trust and CommuteGreener! - Is online trust enough to create stickiness behavior?

Abstract

In the past years more and more services are being offered on-line, ranging from various communication networks to e-commerce. This trend has taken human interaction to another level making communication technologies an important part of human life. Nowadays, online communication is often realized through a mediator: a website. Thus, established offline communication cues are changed when it comes to online interactions. This transition of communication cues is essential when developing trust towards an online community or service, as Trust is described by many researchers as a necessary predictor for continuous use of an online service that is users’ online stickiness behavior. Consumers usually demonstrate stickiness towards a given website in terms of revisits, continuous purchases, increased scope of relationship, and positive recommendations. This thesis focuses on how users build online trust, when communicating with the web application www.commutegreener.com launched by Volvo Group’s IT Innovation Center. Furthermore the study researches the connection between trust and stickiness behavior (users’ continuous revisits of the website; increased scope of the relationship; positive recommendations) at CommuteGreener!. Assuming that trust is not the only factor influencing stickiness behavior, the study also aims to identify whether a diversity of features is another factor that influences stickiness behavior towards CommuteGreener! To investigate these associations a model was modified from existing literature and tested for validity. An online questionnaire was set up and introduced to the users of CommuteGreener! The results show which factors predict trust in the specific context of CommuteGreener! Contrary to our expectations, trust is not identified as the main factor creating stickiness behavior. Instead diversity of features is found to play a major role.