The effect of perceived trust on electronic commerce: Shopping online for tourism products and services in South Korea [Summary]

According to the OECD's 2008 statistics (Seoul Finance Internet News, 2009), Korea was ranked number one in terms of the percentage of homes with Internet access, at 80.6% of the total population. The survey also reported that two-thirds of Koreans with access to the Internet at home are online shoppers. Many tourism companies now actively use Internet sites as a key marketing and sales vehicle for their products and services. To be successful, tourism e-commerce services must be trustworthy. This study aims to examine which factors influence trust, satisfaction, and loyalty. We employed a structural equation modeling approach to investigate the relationships among exogenous variables (navigation functionality, perceived security, and transaction cost) and mediating variables (trust and satisfaction), with loyalty as a dependent variable. To this end, a total of 340 questionnaires were collected from online panel respondents by an Internet research firm.