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Platform trust in C2C e-commerce platform: the sellers’ cultural perspective

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Abstract

With the development of online retailing on third-party e-commerce platforms such as Taobao, the churn of individual shops is becoming increasingly severe. Platform operators are eager to learn the causes of this eroding trust. Based on Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory, this paper aims to investigate how masculinity, uncertainty avoidance and long-term orientation impact platform trust and the interaction between these three cultural variables. Based on data collected from sellers on the largest Chinese C2C platform, we found that uncertainty avoidance had a negative effect on platform trust, while masculinity and long-term orientation exerted a positive impact on platform trust. A significant association among the cultural factors was also found.

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Acknowledgements

The research for this paper was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71801047), the Beijing Philosophy and Social Sciences Planning Project (No. 17GLC052), Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities in UIBE (CXTD12-04), and the Foundation of Key Laboratory of Trustworthy Distributed Computing and Service (BUPT), Ministry of Education.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information, University of International Business and Economics, No. 10 HuixinEast Street, Chaoyang District, Beijing, 100029, China

    Liangjuan Qin, Qixing Qu & Li Zhang

  2. Old Dominion University, Norfolk, USA

    Harris Wu

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  1. Liangjuan Qin
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Correspondence to Qixing Qu.

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Appendices

Appendix 1

Measure and Items

2.1 Sellers’ trust towards e-commerce platform [55]

TRUST01 I believe the e-commerce platform is trustworthy.

TRUST02 I believe the e-commerce platform has enough ability to solve any problem during and after transactions.

TRUST03 I feel confident that encryption and other technological advances on the e-commerce platform make it safe for me to share private information.

TRUST04 I am willing to pay and continue using the e-commerce platform if the site requires a fee to use in the future.

Masculinity [19, 20, 22]

MA01 In work and life, I think men and women should have a clear division of labor and give full play to their strengths, instead of insisting that men and women are all the same.

MA02 In work and life, I believe that accomplishing tasks is more important than caring for others.

MA03 In work and life, I think men should be masculine and women should be feminine.

Uncertainty Avoidance [19, 20, 22]

UA01 It is important to have transaction instructions spelled out in detail so that sellers always know what they are expected to do.

UA02 Standard operating procedures are helpful to sellers during and after transactions.

UA03 Rules and regulations are important because they inform sellers what and how they do during and after transactions.

Long-term Orientation [19, 20, 22]

LO01 We believe that over the long run our relationship with the e-commerce platform will be profitable.

LO02 Maintaining a long-term relationship with the e-commerce platform is important to us.

LO03 We expect the e-commerce platform to be working with us for a long time.

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Qin, L., Qu, Q., Zhang, L. et al. Platform trust in C2C e-commerce platform: the sellers’ cultural perspective. Inf Technol Manag 23, 233–243 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10799-021-00349-1

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