The Trust Deficit of e-commerce: A comparative study of domestic and offshore e-commerce systems

The purpose of this study is to investigate the different effects in terms of various aspects of the e-commerce model on domestic and offshore e-commerce customers. Some 1,108 responses from all 15 major securities and futures brokers (market shares totalled 90%) in Taiwan were returned for a response rate of 98%. The results reveal that the conceptualisation of structural equation model did not differ across the domestic e-Brokerage System (EBS) users and the offshore EBS-users. However, the offshore EBS-users rated the e-Trust lower than what the domestic EBS-users did. We will refer to that difference as 'Offshore Trust Deficit (OTD)'. © 2008, Inderscience Publishers.