Issues of privacy and trust in e-commerce: Exploring customers’ perspective

Abstract

Despite rapid growth in e-commerce, many of the privacy and trust issues concerns remain unaddressed. We report a qualitative study on customers’ concerns over privacy and trust in online purchasing. A number of issues such as data privacy, data security and safety, data disclosure and sharing by the seller with third parties have been explored with regular internet shoppers. The findings suggest that trusted/branded websites, secured websites, websites with clearly stated data protection/privacy policies makes people more comfortable in online shopping and decreases their data privacy concern. While unsecured websites, vague data protection/privacy policy, disclosure of data to the third parties; in turn discourage the users from releasing their personal data while shopping online.