Exploring Customers' Post-Adoption Perceptions: a Study on Trust, Commitment and Related Constructs in B2C Online Service Context

Trust has shown to be an important factor both in the adoption of e-commerce but also in ongoing relationships between buyers and sellers. Information systems literature has discussed trust extensively, yet traditionally mostly focusing on the adoption phase. However, signs of increasing interest to post-adoptive phenomena, such as customer loyalty, can be seen in the recent IS and ecommerce literature. Encouraging customers to continue the relationship after the adoption has been widely seen as vital for e-businesses. This holds especially true with B2C online services, where the relationships are largely based on series of transactions and interactions. The paper presents a research model in which structural assurance and online self-efficacy are viewed as the antecedents of trust, whereas trust and switching costs are investigated as the determinants of commitment. We empirically investigate a sample of active users of online services and use structural equation modeling to analyze the data. The key findings are: 1. perceived structural assurance plays an important role also after the adoption, 2. online self-efficacy was notified to be a determinant of trust, and 3. switching costs are a determinant of commitment.