The Consistency of Trust-Sales Relationship in Latin-American E-commerce

TL;DR

This study investigates the trust-sales relationship in Latin American e-commerce, revealing its inconsistency across countries but confirming its importance as a sales predictor.

Contribution

It provides a data-driven framework analyzing trust and sales across multiple Latin American countries, highlighting regional differences and key predictors.

Findings

Trust-sales relationship varies significantly across countries.

Trust is the most important predictor of sales.

Purchase intention and price are also significant factors.

Abstract

Customer's trust in vendors' reputation is a key factor that facilitates economic transactions in e-commerce platforms. Although the trust-sales relationship is assumed robust and consistent, its empirical evidence remains neglected for Latin American countries. This work aims to provide a data-driven comprehensive framework for extracting valuable knowledge from public data available in the leading Latin American e-commerce platform with commercial operations in 18 countries. Only Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Uruguay, and Venezuela showed the highest trust indexes among all nations analyzed. The trust-sales relationship was statistically inconsistent across nations but worked as the most important predictor of sales, followed by purchase intention and price.