Abstract

This paper studies the formation path of user trust in transactional virtual community, explores the relationship between website perception, merchant reputation and user's personal trust tendency and user's initial trust, and introduces the characteristics of internet word of mouth and sense of virtual community into the analysis framework from initial trust to continuous trust. This research used a quantitative design by developing questionnaires to collect data through the snowball sampling approach from 390 Chinese users of the well-known transactional virtual communities as research population, such as JD community, Dianping community, Tmall community, Xiaomi Forum, Dangdang - online reading community, etc. The results show that users' website perception, merchant reputation and personal trust tendency these three factors have significant positive effects on the formation of initial trust of users. And merchant reputation played the most important role in influencing initial trust of users than any two factors, followed by user's trust tendency and website perception. Besides, initial trust of users was shown to has a significant positive effect on continuous trust of users in transactional virtual community. Furthermore, the characteristics of internet word of mouth was found have significant mediation effect on initial trust and continuous trust of users. More specifically, 41.7% of the influence of the initial trust on the continuous trust was due to the internet word-of-mouth. The findings of this study provide transactional virtual community marketers and managers’ valuable insights into developing effective marketing strategies to improve their community’s service.

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