TRUST is a feeling of certainty that a person or thing is good which is base on inconclusive evidence. According to Mayer et al. (1995) 'We conceptualize trust as existing when one party has confidence in an exchange partner’s reliability and integrity'. Therefore, The word trust is refer to fives factors which is contribute a long-term relationship with customers.
· “T” refers to “Truth“: Sincere to customers is very important. If the problems happened then company should frank and dare to admire all faults. It is a real of customer need and it makes good long term relationship.
· “R” refers to “Reliability”: Anytime that company satisfied the customers need is related to trustworthiness of customers. It seemed to be that reliability created trustworthiness.
· “U” refers to “understand”: Help Company to satisfy the customer need.
· “S” refers to “service”: Good service is a tool that can preserve the customers.
· “T” refers to “take the time”: Trust cannot create to the customer within one day which is why company take time to present their performances.
The flip side of trust is TRUSTWORHTINESS; trustworthiness is ability to be relied on as honest and trustful. In other word, trustworthiness is the company aspect, which wishes to build up their trustworthiness, it should keep in touch with their customers or it is the ability in increasing the return to people who trust you.
In terms of difference, trust and trustworthiness are two different concepts. Both of them are important for the company, although they have different meanings, trust is more about what the company provides whereas trustworthiness is what the company tries to achieve. The differences are trust is usually used to describe someone's feeling on someone/something, however, trustworthiness is emphasized, "someone/something can be trusted by someone.
Indeed, trustworthiness is different in the sense that it is something the company tries to be acknowledged for. It is a concept that the company has to gain over its customers, so that their perception about the services provided by them is reliable. For example, the online purchasing is easy to fraud, then before making a purchase customers normally find out before whether or not that company is trustworthy or not (Buttner and Goritz 2008)
Nowadays, the number of online shops is increasing and companies try to increase their sales through their website. Most of companies try to contribute to the customer’s trust because it is the basis that a firm should create and develop to build a long term and profitable relationship with its customers.
In terms of online business, it is important for e-businesses to set up its trust among its selling process because customers give credit to this aspect of the transactions. If companies build good relationship with the customer, it leads to an improvement and achieve to be successful. However, Trust also plays the important role in business transaction. According to Grabner-Krauter and Kaluscha (2003) ‘lack of trust is cited as the main reason for not doing online shopping’. Indeed, companies can build trust and impression of customers in the first time because there are many ways to create trust such as after sale support: delivery, service quality, communication (Chandan Chakrabortya and Chakrabortyb 2007).
Due to the trustworthiness, Trustworthiness is important in e-marketing as well because a successful online company needs to possess a trustworthy online: transaction system, including the payment, delivery, suppliers, etc. and then they can win their customers trusts later on. According to Trustworthiness is more important than trust as the beliefs of trustworthiness, integrity, ability and benevolence could be measured with explicit tools, like, finance record, company credibility and so on. For example, Amazon.com are trustworthy (Gefen,2000 cited in Buttner and Goritz 2008).
Trustworthiness is a factor that helps company gain more credibility. If the level of trustworthiness is higher, people will be confident with the company after the customers purchased the products through on-line store and it will lead to increasing of people who to loyal with the E-marketing (Bolton, Loebbecke and Ockenfels 2008). As a result, trustworthiness is an important process of the activity of e-marketing. It is through the trustworthiness that the company builds its reputation and its network of stakeholders. Therefore, this concept is the basis of the business since it will have impacts on many aspects of the activity of the company. In other words, supplier will refer to the trustworthiness of the company as well as credit institutions and customers. All these stakeholders are looking for a firm that is reliable in order to decrease the perceived risk of making business. The trustworthiness can be considered as a tool to determine the perceived risk of a potential or existing relationship within a partnership (Hanai and OGuchi 2009), also according to Mayer et al. (1995) 'Trust will lead to risk taking in relationship, and form of the risk taking depends on the situation'. For example, when the company starts to determine the conditions of a contract with a supplier, the latter will try to measure the trustworthiness of the potential customer and will take decisions according to it.
In conclusion, Trust relationships are a marketing process that takes time. Trustworthiness, on the other hand, is very difficult to quantify accurately. Both trust and trustworthiness play an important role to E-Marketing. It seems to be that trustworthiness is more important than trust because trustworthiness enables to strengthen efficiently the relationships with the stakeholders. However it is relevant to notice that a company which deals with e-marketing cannot rely on trustworthiness if customers do not trust it from the beginning. As a result both concepts are tightly linked since they are complementary. In the end, trust is necessary to build trustworthiness but trustworthiness gives sense to trust.
Bolton, G., Loebbecke, C. and Ockenfels, A. (2008) Does Competition Promote Trust andTrustworthiness in Online Trading? An Experimental Study Journal of Management Information Systems [online] 25 (2), 145–169. Available from <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=34882763&site=ehost-live>[15 March 2010]
Chakraborty, C. and Chakraborty, D (2007) Fuzzy rule base for consumer trustworthiness in Internet marketing: An interactive fuzzy rule classification approach Intelligent Data Analysis 11 [online] 339-353 Available from <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=25973125&site=ehost-live>[ 17 March 2010]
Mayer, R.C.,
Morgan, R.M. and Hunt, S.D. (1994) ‘The Commitment-Trust Theory of Relationship Marketing’,Journal of Marketing (58), 20-38
