Putting Trust into E-commerce - One Page at a Time*

One of the most important phenomena in E-Commerce is trust customers are unlikely to complete transactions if they do not trust the web site they are using. Much thought has been given to aspects of buyer-seller trust in the area of how much the seller trusts the buyer, or at least how to ensure ‘trust.’ However, to date there has been little headway into the concept of how much buyers trust sellers, with some notable exceptions. In this paper, we present an architecture for E-Commerce web sites which uses a formalisation of trust to allow the individual web pages in such a site to reason about the amount of trust a browsing customer has in them and to adapt accordingly. This architecture builds on work in several areas, including personalisation technologies, retail management, HCI and multi agent systems. The paper discusses the concept of trust reasoning web pages, their implementation, and a proof of concept design architecture.