USING IMAGE TO FOSTER BUSINESS TO CONSUMER
ONLINE TRUST
Khalid Al-Diri, Dave Hobbs
Informatics school, Bradford University, Bradford, UK
Rami Qahwaji
Informatics school, Bradford University, Bradford, UK
Keywords: E-Commerce, E-Vendor, Internet, Online Shopping, Saudi Arabia.
Abstract: Much of the latest research on business to consumer (B2C) e-commerce has focused on ways of building
trust through cues that encourage consumers to purchase through online since it suffers from the lack of face
to face interpersonal exchanges that enhance trust behaviour in conventional commerce. To bridge the
human interaction dilemma, an extensive laboratory based experiment was conducted to assess the trust of
consumers using four online vendors’ websites. This paper addresses the issues and findings of a study that
uses Western and Saudi images as well as video clips to mimic customer support in increasing the
behavioural purchasing trust of the online vendor. The findings from the study clearly highlight that images
have an imperative role to play in increasing the trust of online consumers with Saudi images playing a
pivotal role in increasing this kind of trust.
1 INTRODUCTION
The Internet brings a new era, in which individuals,
organizations as well as governmental sectors
actively participate in varieties of exchanges. Since
2000, the worldwide Internet users have been
exploding with an average annual rate of 20%, rising
from 254 million in 1999 to 1,022 billion in March
2006 (internetworldstats.com). The growth of the
World Wide Web (WWW) and its acceptance
among consumers have paved a way to the rise of
electronic commerce (EC), since the Internet is the
prime source for conducting e-commerce. The use of
EDI at the beginning of the 1980s boosted the
development of e-business greatly. Having entered
the 21st century, e-commerce still develops very
fast, and a lot of enterprises in developed countries
have gained success in this area. According to the
(emarketer.com), total online retail sales for 2005
were $144,613 million. On a trend, retail e
commerce in the United States could amount to
$243, 558 million by 2008(emarketer.com). (Wallis,
2006) shows that 55 per cent of households (12.9
million households) in Great Britain had access to
the Internet from home in July 2005. This compares
with just 32 per cent in July 2000. In addition to the
expansion of Internet access there has been an
increase in the number of people using the Internet
to buy or order goods, tickets and services. In 2001
Internet sales to households from the UK non-
financial sector stood at £4 billion; by 2004 these
had increased to over £18 billion. The growth in
Internet sales from 2003 to 2004 is over 67 per cent,
which clearly show a very rapid expansion in the
value of Internet sales. In the Asia-Pacific region, it
grow rapidly, from about $200 billion in 2003 to
about $300 billion by 2004 (UNCTAD, 2003).There
is also a good foundation for e-commerce
applications in some Asia countries like for example
China. Many research companies and scholars have
forecast the market potential of the Internet and the
future development of e-commerce. In contrast the
situation in the Arab world is not optimistic since the
estimated figure for B2C in Africa and Middle East
can not be compared with those in US, UE,
China(UNCTAD, 2004). So with the expansion of
internet shopping it has become increasingly
important to understand the factors which influence
consumer purchase decisions in the Middle East web
context.
253
Al-Diri K., Hobbs D. and Qahwaji R. (2007).
USING IMAGE TO FOSTER BUSINESS TO CONSUMER ONLINE TRUST.
In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Signal Processing and Multimedia Applications, pages 249-256
DOI: 10.5220/0002134402490256
Copyright
c
 SciTePress

2 THEORETICAL FOUNDATION
AND HYPOTHESES
Researches indicate that human beings like to reduce
their social uncertainty. In other words, they seek
ways to recognize, predict, and occasionally attempt
to control the behaviour of other people (M.-S. Kim
& Ahn, 2005) . When social uncertainty cannot be
reduced through rules and customs, people resort to
trust and, to a lesser degree, to familiarity as a major
social complexity reduction method (Zeng, Zeng, &
Guo, 2005). Indeed, trust is the most enduring
characteristic of human interaction (Serva,
Benamati, & Fuller, 2005), especially when the
projected outcomes of the interaction with others are
not fully governed by rules and guarantees (Zhang &
Zhang, 2005). Trust is crucial wherever risk,
uncertainty, or interdependence are present
(Gillespie, 2000). These conditions increase in many
settings, and certainly exist in the relationship
between vendors and customers (David Gefen &
Straub, 2004). As conditions become more uncertain
in e-commerce because business complexity
increases through computer-mediated commerce, the
need for trust grows (E. Kim & Tadisina, 2005).
Consistent with this observation, trust should be
even more important in e-commerce than in
traditional commerce because of the paucity of rules
and customs in regulating e-commerce and since
online services and products typically are not
immediately verifiable (David Gefen & Straub,
2004). Furthermore, online transactions lack the
assurance provided in traditional settings through
formal proceedings and receipts (D. Gefen, 2000).
Trust is one variable which is receiving considerable
attention since it seems likely that consumers will
prefer to buy from sites which they trust; indeed lack
of trust is often cited as a significant barrier to e-
commerce adoption (Egger, 2002). However, the
enormous potential of B2C commerce can only be
realized if consumers feel comfortable transacting
over the new medium with unfamiliar vendors
(David Gefen & Straub, 2003). This suggests that
consumer decisions to adopt B2C commerce involve
not only perceptions of the technology e.g.,
perceived usefulness and ease of use; but also beliefs
about the e-vendor (Friedman, Jr, & Howe, 2000).
2.1 Media Cue in B2C Websites
A key difference between online and offline
consumer markets that is stifling the growth of e-
commerce is the lack of the human and social
element (Qiu, Qiu, Benbasat, & Benbasat, 2005).
The online shopping, is primarily geared towards
reducing the user’s cognitive burden through
functional and performance based website design
heuristics (Kumar & Benbasat, 2002) . As such, e-
commerce may be viewed as lacking human warmth
and sociability, since it is more impersonal,
anonymous and automated than traditional person-
to-person commerce (Head, 2001) . Online vendors
face a significant challenge in making their virtual
storefront socially rich (Kumar & Benbasat, 2002).
Prior research has suggested that the perception of
social presence can positively influence user trust
and intentions in an online context (Kumar &
Benbasat, 2002). Online consumers’ perceptions of
interpersonal cues which also known as social
presence cues through media cue ( photo, video clip,
sound,…etc) have been shown to positively
influence trust and their subsequent intention to
purchase from a commercial website (David Gefen
& Straub, 2003). Instilling a sense of human warmth
and sociability can be accomplished by providing
means for actual interaction with other humans or by
stimulating the imagination of interacting with other
humans. In a web context, actual interaction with
other humans may be incorporated through website
features such as e-mail after-sales support,
imaginary interactions including socially-rich
picture content, message boards, socially-rich text
content, personalized greetings (David Gefen &
Straub, 2003), virtual communities, chats,
personalized greetings (Kumar & Benbasat, 2002),
and human web assistants (Aberg, 2001). Website
features may instil social presence through
imaginary interactions and include human audio
(Lombard, 1997), human video (Kumar & Benbasat,
2002), and intelligent agents (Papadopoulou, 2001).
The effect of pictures, and video clip may be even
more pronounced. According to (Karvonen, 2001) ,
our visual senses dominate our perception and visual
media have more social presence than written media.
(Fogg, 2002) found that photos accompanying
online articles can increase their credibility, and
(Zheng, Veinott, Olson, Olson, & Bos, 2002) found
that photos of players increased cooperation in social
dilemma games. Advertising has long relied on
imagery of “friendly faces” to build a positive
attitude towards products (Riegelsberger, 2003).
(Dormann, 2000),(Dormann, 2001) suggests that
paying attention to picture effectiveness, via
emotional or social display, can be a key factor to
the success of electronic commerce. It should be
emphasized, then, that the studies on applying
interpersonal cues, especially through photographs,
video clip, or sound, to web site design are still in a
SIGMAP 2007 - International Conference on Signal Processing and Multimedia Applications
254

preliminary stage. However, the researchers do
present a potentially effective approach to enhance
online trust by adding a surrogate human presence
and actual contact opportunities to the otherwise
impersonal e-commerce interface. As a result of the
foregoing it is hypothesised that:
H-1: Subjects differ significantly on their rating
of initial trust and trust intention across vendor’s
websites.
H-2: The higher rating of vendor’s website
trustworthiness will be for those presenting video
clips than for that with photos and that without
photos respectively.
2.2 The Important of Culture in
Website Design
Trust may form in a variety of ways, whether and
how trust is established depend on the cultural
factors (e.g., societal norms, values, etc.) that direct
people's behaviors and beliefs (Hofstede, 1980).
Online trust researches have been limited to western
context, particularly focusing on the U.S. (Ba &
Pavlou, 2002). However, the trust theories and
mechanisms developed in the western context might
not apply for other societies, especially since culture
may affect the antecedents of trust (Chong, Yang, &
Wong, 2003). For example, (Sako, 1998) noted that
there were differences in trust perceptions between
Japanese and US subjects in terms of the level of
trust, the way in which trust was conceptualized, and
the way in which it was formed. Thus, there is a
need to re-examine the notion of trust and identify
its determinants in the context of different markets
and cultures (Lee & Turban, 2001). For that,
understanding how to build trust for diverse
consumers in electronic markets is a central
imperative (Jones, 2002). Symbols are an important
element denoting culture (Marcus & Gould, 2000).
Symbols are “metaphors” denoting actions of the
user (Barber & Badre, 2001), and it can be varied
and may represent a wide range of features
(Fernandes, 1995). One important form of symbols
is multimedia relating to culture which few
researchers have examined. On the basis of the
discussion above, the following additional research
hypotheses were proposed:
H-3: Across websites including human portraits
there will be significant statistical differences in
their trustworthiness between websites with a Saudi
photo and websites with a Western photo.
H-4: Saudi subjects will trust a website with a
Saudi photo more than a web-site with a Western
photo.
3 EXPERIMENT
METHODOLOGY
This study attempted to investigate and examine the
effects of the interpersonal cues or the social cues
that can be manipulated by facial photo, video clip,
and culture as control variables, which used Saudi
and Western people in each of the interpersonal cues
when forming the initial trust toward online vendors.
3.1 Experimental Material
Four laptop shopping websites were selected since
this product carries a considerably higher financial
risk than another product. In this selection western
shopping sites were chosen as they constituted a
realistic scenario with relatively high risk, due to the
vendor and the users being in two different
countries. Semi-functional copies websites were
designed including the homepage and some
subsequent layers depending on the available links
in each layer, so that participants were able to
browse and search general information on the site,
such as ‘about us’, privacy and security policies
including access to detailed product descriptions.
Also any certification or reputation seals that were
present on some pages were removed. The
interpersonal artefacts, (photo, video clip) were put
in an appropriate and attractive place in the first
page of the site showing the selected product
(without deleting or hiding anything from the page
itself). The perceived trustworthiness of the photos
that were used in the experiments needed to be
established in a pre experiment. This also served to
establish how professional and ‘real’ the photos
were in representing a customer service. More than
sixty candidate photos were collected of men
(western, and Saudi), which were reviewed and the
most suitable chosen to represent the appropriate
professional customer representatives of an online
shopping site. Five professionals in computing and
business were then invited to rate the photos and
select the most appropriate. These photos were then
subsequently used in these experiments. For the
video clips, the same procedure was followed.
3.2 Data Collection
The research instrument was the questionnaire that
was developed by adapting existing measures from
the literature to the current research context (Teo &
Liu, 2005) and (D. Gefen, Straub, & Boudreau,
2000), (McKnigh, Choudhury, & Kacmar, 2002),
(Kammerer, 2000). All the questionnaire items were
USING IMAGE TO FOSTER BUSINESS TO CONSUMER ONLINE TRUST
255

scored on a five-point Likert-type scale ranging from
(1) strongly disagree to (5) strongly agree. As the
experiments were conducted in Saudi Arabia (Saudi
being predominantly Arabic-speaking) the
questionnaire, originally written in English, was
translated into Arabic by a bilingual person whose
native language is Arabic. The Arabic questionnaire
was then translated back into English by another
bilingual person. These two English versions were
then compared and no item was found to deviate
significantly in terms of language. Subjects for the
study were general Internet users representing
undergraduate and graduate students at two famous
computer training institutes. The use of student
subjects was deemed appropriate since online
consumers are generally younger and more highly
educated than conventional customers, which makes
student samples closer to the online consumer
population (Saarenp & Tiainen, 2005). Thus
students are quite representative of online shoppers.
All experimental tasks during this research
experiment were performed in a computer
laboratory.
3.3 Experimental Procedure and Tasks
Previous online trust researches had been criticised
for relying on measuring the trust without inducing
any form of risk (Riegelsberger, Sasse, & McCarthy,
2003), while it represents an important key related to
trust. To overcome these criticisms, this study
induced financial risk in a laboratory situation.
While it does not fully represent a real-world risk,
however, it allows combining a laboratory setting
with some element of real-world risk by informing
participants that the experiment website
trustworthiness has been assessed and rated by
independent business reviewer sites and one of their
tasks is to identify the trustworthiness of each
shopping site, whose rating matches the real rate of
the trustworthiness which will be entered in a lucky
draw with prizes up to a laptop and a mobile phone
set which will be offered in a random draw
conducted at the end of the study. In this way we
have induced a little bit high level of risk and
increased the realism of the experiment. At the
beginning of the experiment the experimenter gave a
written introduction explaining the objectives of the
experiment and the total estimated time that it would
take (namely 45 minutes). Then participants were
asked to fill out sets of questionnaires that extracted
some demographic characteristics, online purchasing
experience, propensity or disposition to trust, and
system assurance or Institution-based trust.
Each subject was then asked to look at the four
websites and perform a general search in the
website. This involved looking at the site and then
evaluating this e-commerce vendor using the online
vendors trust questionnaire. This process was
repeated for all of the four websites. To control the
order effects, the order of presentation of the four
experimental websites was completely
counterbalanced. When subjects finished seeing all
the four websites and filling in their questionnaires,
they were asked to do another task. In this task
participants were asked to assess the websites that
they had seen, and to rank them according to their
preferences.
4 DATA ANALYSIS AND
DISCUSSION
All data analysis was conducted using SPSS
windows software package version 12. A total of 72
subjects participated in this study; all of them were
males with ages between 18-25 and 26-35
respectively, most of them (79.2%) at bachelor
degree level. 39% of the respondents spending
between 6-10 hours online per week. On average,
the majority made at least one online purchase per
week while (28%) of the respondents spent 2000SR
and more per online purchase. As mentioned above
the vendor trustworthiness questionnaire was built to
cover all the common dimensions or factors of trust
belief that the researchers in this field mostly agree
with, namely integrity, ability, and benevolence.
Also it tested the subjects’ trust intention regarding
online vendors that they saw. Bivariate correlation
(Kendall’s tau-b) results showed that the correlation
between the most common constructions of trust
belief for each website was significant at the 0.01
level.
4.1 Testing the Research Hypotheses
To test the first hypothesis (H-1), nonparametric K-
Related samples, Friedman test was computed
between each of the trust belief factors and trust
intention for all the websites to see if there is any
significance statistical difference between subjects’
answers regarding the trustworthiness of the four
websites. Results showed the subjects differ
significantly on their ratings of their initial trust and
trust intention regarding the four vendors’ websites
since the overall statistical significance (p< .05); so
the first hypothesis was supported. See table-1.
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256

Table 1: Statistic test for Trust Belief and Trust Intention
for the four websites.
For the second hypothesis (H-2) in order to test
it, we have compared the average mean value for the
three dimensions of trust belief and trust intention
between the four websites, See Table-2. Subjects
rated the initial trust and trust intention for photo
website the highest, the video clip website next, and
the no photo website as the lowest. Thus, the second
hypothesis was partially supported, since the vendor
with video clip came in the second rank rather than
the expected first position. A possible explanation
for this unexpected result is that the video clip was
not recorded to professional standards.
For the third hypothesis (H-3) the same
procedure as done in testing the first and the second
hypothesis was used to test the third and the fourth
hypothesis, but in this case between two vendors
websites only (website with Saudi photo and website
with Western photo). Friedman test showed the
subjects differ significantly on their rating of their
initial trust (ability and integrity of trust belief, but
not for benevolence dimension) and trust intention
regarding the two vendors websites since the overall
statistical significance (p<.05); so the third
hypothesis was fully supported see table-3.
Table 2: Mean Value for Trust Belief and Trust Intention
for Each Website.
Table 3: Statistic test for Trust Belief and Trust Intention
for website with Western photo and website with Saudi
photo.
With respect to the fourth hypothesis (H-4), we
compared the average mean value for the three
dimensions of trust belief and trust intention
between the two websites, See Table-4. Results
indicated that subjects rated the initial trust and trust
intention for website with Saudi photo higher than
the website with Western photo. So the fourth
hypothesis is supported. The results indicate that
media cue in a website is an effective scheme to
increase consumer trust in an online-vendor.
Displaying a media cue (photograph or video clip)
helps to assimilate the online shopping to a face to
face situation, since customers can develop a quasi-
social relationship to the person shown in the media
cue. The displayed person represents an entry point
for the consumer to the on-line vendor and facilitates
the establishment of customer trust. The media cue
is a simple, yet a powerful, way to increase the
trustworthiness of an online-vendor.
Table 4: Mean Value for Trust Belief and Trust Intention
for website with Western photo and website with Saudi
photo.
4.2 Preference Ranking
Participants were asked to rank the four vendors
according to their preference. The question was
phrased as follows: “Assuming that all sites offer the
product you are looking for at the same price with
the same condition, consider which site you would
be most comfortable buying from.” In contrast to the
other measures, this measure forced the participants
to bring the vendors into a hierarchical order. The
order of preference of all the websites is presented in
table-5.
USING IMAGE TO FOSTER BUSINESS TO CONSUMER ONLINE TRUST
257

Table 5: Order of Preference Rank for Each Website.
Finally many nonparametric correlation tests
were conducted to see if there were any significant
differences between the trust belief, trust intention
and participants’ age, education level, Internet
usage. Results showed no statistical significance
differences between all these variables.
5 CONCLUSION
From a theoretical point of view, this study extends
the interpersonal cues or social presence cues
research in the e-commerce domain. Our findings
also confirm earlier works that show a positive
impact of the photograph on trust e.g. (Gefen et al.
2003a; this paper shows that interpersonal cues can
be infused into websites through pictures and video
clip. This in turn, can positively impact the
perceived trustworthiness of a commercial website,
which can result in more favourable attitudes
towards that online store. This experiment tested the
effect of adding a facial photo from two different
cultures (Western, Saudi) to an e-commerce
vendor’s homepage on user trust. It thus focused on
the symbolic use of interpersonal cues. This goal,
despite its importance for the development of trust in
e-commerce, has not been addressed in previous
researches. This experiment found that media cues
in the interface are indeed able to affect a vendor’s
trustworthiness based on the surface cues it contains.
A clear picture has emerged regarding the effect of
photos from different cultures. Most of the previous
studies have tested the effects of adding one photo to
a mock-up of one e-commerce site. This experiment
was aimed at overcoming this limitation by testing
several photos on several semi-functional copies of
existing vendors’ sites. In addition, this experiment
introduced a method for measuring trust that
required participants to make decisions under
conditions of financial risk. Finally during the
experiment design there was an expectation that the
website with the video clip would be ranked as the
highest since video can display more interpersonal
cues than photo, but this turned out not to be the
case, possibly due to its lower quality. There are a
few limitations to this research that should be noted.
Results of this study were obtained using IT training
institute student subjects. These results may be
different from results obtained using more typical
online shoppers. However, the majority of e-
commerce studies utilize students as their subject
pool (Grabner-Krauter & Kaluscha, 2003). Also this
research is no exception in terms of generalizability.
There is a need to investigate the effect of other
subject groups, settings, products and times. Other
areas for future research include: investigating other
product types, other media cue elements, for
example (avatar, human audio), investigating m-
commerce applications. All these issues should also
be explored.
6 IMPLICATION
We suggest some implications that web designers
and e-commerce vendors can use in the form of the
following recommendations when introducing e-
commerce applications in Middle East countries in
general and in Saudi Arabia in particular: There is a
significance effect of a media cue (photo, video clip)
in B2C e-commerce websites. The positive attractive
impressions of a media cue can thus help in the
process of attracting a new customer. The findings
of this experiment highlight the importance of the
interface as a communicator of trustworthiness. In
B2C e-commerce applications it is very important to
carefully select and design the various elements of
web design in the context of culture. It is expected
that when web sites are appropriate and culturally
sensitive, then users will have increased access to
content and enhanced user experiences. (Al-Diri,
Hobbs DJ, & R, 2006).
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