E-business differentiation through value-based trust

For e-business, location is irrelevant and competition is intense. To succeed in this environment, organizations must find new ways to differentiate themselves from their competition. One way to achieve e-business differentiation is to foster trust by building a perception of value congruence and avoiding a perception of value conflict. We explore how value congruence contributes to and how value conflict decreases trust in e-businesses. An experiment was conducted to examine the respective impacts of value congruence and value conflict on trust in an e-commerce setting. Our results show that, for e-businesses, value congruence has an enabling effect on trust while value conflict reduces trust. Such effects are strong enough to suggest that value congruence can be employed as an effective way for e-businesses to differentiate themselves while creating and sustaining competitive advantage. Managerial implications are drawn from our results.