The development of a new capability maturity model for assessing trust in B2C e-commerce services

Abstract

Trust has been identified as a vital key for e-Commerce business success. Therefore, trust issues should be embedded along with e-Commerce development process. This research aims to propose a new approach for assessing both trust and quality improvement in e-Commerce services. This proposed model is called Trust Capability Maturity Model (TCMM). TCMM is established based on the following concepts: 1) trust formation process, 2) ISO 9126 standard, 3) SERVQUAL, and 4) Delone and Mclean's IS success model. The benefits of using TCMM are twofold: one, customers can measure the level of trust by creating their own vendor profile; two, B2C vendors can construct their own trust development programs. This model consists of 55 initial criteria for five maturity levels. B2C vendors can develop their trust capability from one stage to another by achieving the performance tasks in each maturity level. Future research will focus on the empirical validation of TCMM framework. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.