Page 65 - Electronic Commerce

Chapter 1

Trust Issues on the Web
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It is important for all businesses to establish trusting relationships with their customers.
Companies with established reputations in the physical world often create trust by
ensuring that customers know who they are. These businesses can rely on their
established brand names to create trust on the Web. New companies that want to do
business online face a more difficult challenge because a kind of anonymity exists for
companies trying to establish a Web presence.
For example, a U.S. bank can establish a Web site that offers services throughout the
world. No potential customer visiting the site can determine just how large or well
established the bank is simply by browsing through the site’s pages. Because Web site
visitors will not become customers unless they trust the company behind the site, a plan
for establishing credibility is essential. Sellers on the Web cannot assume that visitors will
know that the site is operated by a trustworthy business.
Customers’ inherent lack of trust in “strangers” on the Web is logical and to be
expected; after all, people have been doing business with their neighbors—not strangers—
for thousands of years. When a company grows to become a large corporation with
multinational operations, its reputation grows commensurately. Before a company can do
business in dozens of countries, it must prove its trustworthiness by satisfying customers
for many years as it grows. Businesses on the Web must find ways to overcome this well-
founded tradition of distrusting strangers, because today a company can incorporate one
day and, through the Web, be doing business the next day with people all over the world.
For businesses to succeed on the Web, they must find ways to quickly generate the trust
that traditional businesses take years to develop.

Language Issues
Most companies realize that the only way to do business effectively in other cultures is to
adapt to those cultures. The phrase “think globally, act locally” is often used to describe
this approach. The first step that a Web business usually takes to reach potential
customers in other countries, and thus in other cultures, is to provide local language
versions of its Web site. This may mean translating the Web site into another language or
regional dialect. Researchers have found that customers are far more likely to buy
products and services from Web sites in their own language, even if they can read English
well. Only about 400 million of the world’s 7 billion people learned English as their native
language.
Researchers estimated in 2013 that between 25 percent and 55 percent of all Web
content was in English, but more than half of Internet users at that time did not read
English. By 2015, more than 90 percent of Internet users will be outside the United
States, and 70 percent of electronic commerce transactions will involve at least one party
located outside the United States. By 2016, researchers estimate that Chinese will equal
English as the most-used language online, with each language at 25 percent of the total.
Some languages require multiple translations for separate dialects. For example, the
Spanish spoken in Spain is different from that spoken in Mexico, which is different from
that spoken elsewhere in Latin America. People in parts of Argentina and Uruguay use yet
a fourth dialect of Spanish. Many of these dialect differences are spoken inflections, which

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