The Consistency of Trust-Sales Relationship in Latin-American E-commerce
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A taken-for-granted factor that facilitates the economic transactions in E-commerce platforms is the customer's trust in vendors' reputation. The empirical evaluation targeting the statistical consistency of the trust-sales relationship, however, remains neglected in the literature. As an exploratory attempt of filling this gap, we provide a data-driven comprehensive framework that allows us to develop a reproducible web scraping procedure that automatically extracts the information of the interaction between customers and sellers in a Latin-American E-Commerce website with commercial operations in 18 countries. Among all nations analyzed, only Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Uruguay, and Venezuela showed the highest indexes of trust. Although the trust-sales relationship was not statistically consistent across nations, trust proved to be the most important predictor of sales followed by purchase intention and price.
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