How shall I trust the faceless and the intangible? A literature review on the antecedents of online trust

Trust is generally assumed to be an important precondition for people’s adoption of electronic services. This paper provides an overview of the available research into the antecedents of trust in both commercial and non-commercial online transactions and services. A literature review was conducted covering empirical studies on people’s trust in and adoption of computer-mediated services. Results are described using a framework of three clusters of antecedents: customer/client-based, website-based, and company/organization-based antecedents. Results show that there are many possible antecedents of trust in electronic services. The majority of the research has been conducted in the context of e-commerce; only few studies are available in the domains of e-government and e-health. For many antecedents, some empirical support can be found, but the results are far from univocal. The research calls for more, and particularly more systematic, research attention for the antecedents of trust in electronic services. The review presented in this paper offers practitioners an overview of possibly relevant variables that may affect people’s trust in electronic services. It also gives a state-of-the-art overview of the empirical support for the relevance of these variables.