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1. Introduction
Cross-border e-commerce refers to the practice of buying online from merchants located in other countries and jurisdictions (CBEC, 2015). Global business-to-consumer (B2C) cross-border e-commerce generates transactions totaling $230bn per year, a value which is expected to increase to $1 trillion in the near future (Erickson, 2015). As the need to purchase overseas products increases, overseas purchasing services emerge. For instance, MyDay (myday.com.tw) and Grabr (grabr.io) help users discover and buy products from overseas suppliers. However, little research has been done to understand the factors that lead consumers to shop across national borders. This study investigates those factors from the perspectives of perceived trustworthiness and value. The research findings can help e-commerce companies attract foreign consumers to shop on their websites and help the mediation channels (e.g. overseas purchasing service providers) understand users’ needs in order to provide better services.
Extant studies on cross-border e-commerce have focused mainly on the B2B context. Koh et al. (2012) reported that trust is the main factor that affects global B2B relationships. Buyers interpret the signals from the supplier-level and country-level characteristics, which impact their trust in the foreign supplier. In the B2C context, the consumer is an individual buyer who makes a purchase for his or her own consumption. In contrast to organizational buyers, individual consumers make purchase decisions that are more influenced by personal factors, e.g., the consumer’s own personality and values (Kotler and Keller, 2015). Prior studies have shown that consumers’ propensity to trust affects their trust in an online vendor (Kim et al., 2008). However, little research has been done to understand why some people tend to trust others while some do not. “Attachment” refers to the particular way in which an individual relates to other people. Individuals with a secure attachment style tend to perceive others as accessible, reliable, trustworthy and well-intentioned (Simpson, 1990; Collins and Read, 1990). This study investigates how consumers’ attachment styles in personal relationships influence their attachment styles in relationships with firms, thus determining their trust in a given firm.
Consumers’ online buying intentions are determined by the perceptions of both trustworthiness and value (Chen, 2012; Lim, 2015; Kim et al., 2012). “Perceived value” refers to the tradeoff between all relevant costs and benefits (Broekhuizen, 2006; Zeithaml,...