The Influence of Discussions in Virtual Communities on Consumers´ Purchasing Behaviors in E-commerce: Implications for Trust Sources, Trust Building, and Consumer Purchase Intention

Virtual Community and E-commerce are both new research area which is becoming popular in IS academia. In most of research papers, virtual community and e-commerce are talked separately in different stream. Since many e-commerce websites contain a virtual community, we combine these two together to consider whether discussions in virtual communities can influence people´s online shopping behaviors. This paper bases on literature of trust to propose that there are several types of trust sources - poster trust sources, consumer trust sources, and environment trust sources - engender consumer trust in posters in a virtual community. In addition, consumer trust in posters can affect consumer trust in sellers who referred in the posters´ discussion contents, and then affect consumers´ purchase intention further.