Placing Trust at the Center of Your Internet Strategy

Professor Glen L. Urbancodirects the Center foreBusiness@MIT, SloanSchool of Management.Fareena Sultan is associateprofessor of marketing,College of BusinessAdministration. NortheasternUniversity, Boston. ProfessorWilliam J. aualls directs theIndustrial DistributionManagement Program at theUniversity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Contact theauthors at: glurban@mit.edu,fsultan@cba.neu.edu andwqualls@uiuc.edu.When consumers visit a retail Web site,how do they know that the informationdescribing the products or services theywant to buy is accurate and unbiased?When they order and pay for a productonline, how do they know that theirfinancial records will be protected, thatthe product will be delivered on time, orthat they can return something that isdamaged or fails to meet their expecta-tions? The answer is they often don't know.Consumers must make these and manyother online research and purchasingdecisions almost solely on the basis oftrust. Yet most Web sites provide con-sumers with scanty information on whichto base their trust. Some Web retailers arestart-ups with little or no track record offulfillment. Some may be on shaky finan-cial footing and unable to meet their ser-vice and delivery guarantees. Some secretlycollect data about each customer's Webactivity and then sell this information tothird-party marketing firms. Even well-regarded companies like AOL have suf-fered embarrassing security breaches,while auction sites such as eBay havebeen scrutinized for their failure to effec-tively police self-serving "customerreviews" posted by the sellers and theirfriends. It's no exaggeration to say that asconsumers become more sophisticatedabout the Internet, Web-site trust is going