Increasing Significance of Trust Building Mechanisms in Indian e-tailing Business: A Prelude

Abstract

India, one of the top 5 countries in the world with a massive retail industry has witnessed much rapid strides in e-tail (short form for “electronic retail”; also known as online retail) business in the past decade. The growth rate is coming down and market is dominated by a few. These issues forced the author to dwell more into these aspects as to what is impeding the e-tail business in India which has a tremendous potential given its population and size of the e-tail market at present. During the preliminary research, one major aspect that came glaringly out is how the e-tail companies are adopting various trust building mechanisms (TBMs) to attract more and more customers and existing customers to come back again. This paper basically discusses about the evolution of TBMs and the direction in which they are moving. The objective of this research is to give a pathway which would lead further into probing various other aspects from strategy and customer point of view etc., for e-tailers (electronic retailers) to concentrate on.