To trust or not to trust? : Developing a scale for measuring online trust cues

Trust is as a key success factor for online business, especially in the earliest stage of a business relationship, when users transact with a service for the first time. Among the drivers of online trust identified in the literature are features of the online business that signal its trustworthiness to potential users, i.e. trust cues. Although there are well established scales to measure (online) trust and many of its antecedents, such instruments are lacking when it comes to trust cues. We attempt to fill this gap by systematically developing a scale that measures and distinguishes core cues impacting the formation of online trust. The scale development is based on data collected in a survey of 1'549 German Internet users. Exploratory factor analysis of a broad item pool identified six cues: Website Design & Reputation, Information Practices, Privacy Assurances, Customer Service, Service Benefits, and Offline Presence. Confirmatory methods (CFA, SEM) are then employed to scrutinize the validity of the scale. The analysis results in a set of 38 items which capture the six cues, show sufficient validity and describe a wide spectrum of possible cues. Finally, a reduced version of the scale containing only 29 items is provided.