Economic Function of Trust Seal in E-Commerce: An Experiment Study Based on Chinese Subjects

Online trust risk is one of the main bottlenecks for the development of e-commerce. Especially for those small nameless companies, it is hard for them to build trust with consumers, regardless of them having good trust condition or not. Therefore, how to display online trust condition is the first and key step for small companies to succeed in online business. An online trust seal which is supplied by big companies with good reputation or other trusted third parties is one of effective approaches to show small companies real trust condition. It is attached to the website of small companies to prove that these companies have good trust condition and promise to comply with big companies´ trust regulation to the consumers. So an online trust seal can enhance small companies´ reputation and promote their online sale. This paper mainly probes into the economic function of trust seals, which is based on the function of promoting sales, bringing forward some hypothesis. The scenario survey method was used for data collection and the regression analysis by statistics software SPSS12 was used to test hypotheses. The results show that the trust seals are generally effective in promoting website sales, and different trust seals have different effect, and the same seal has a more significant effect on one category product over the other.