Safe or Scam? An Empirical Simulation Study on Trust Indicators in Online Shopping

Autor(en): Sebastian Schrittwieser, Andreas Ekelhart, Esther Seidl, Edgar R. Weippl
Abstrakt: Complaints from Internet users about online shopping scams have increased signiﬁcantly in recent years.
An indication of the trustworthiness of a store can be obtained by a user on the basis of a number of trust
indicators, such as available payment methods or availability and correctness of contact information. In this
paper, we analyzed the behavior of 646 participants during online shopping with regards to non-technical trust
indicators. Our work is based on an online shopping simulation study including one trustworthy and two scam
store imitations. By automatically tracking the participants’ behavior, we found that only a minority of users
pay attention to trust indicators and most participants of the study purchased in an obvious scam store (28%)
– most likely due to its lower prices. Personal (age, gender, educational level, frequency of online purchase or
Internet usage at work) and contextual (time pressure) factors did not signiﬁcantly inﬂuence the choice.
Organisation(en): Forschungsgruppe Security and Privacy
Publikationsdatum: 07-2024
Peer-reviewed: Ja
ÖFOS 2012: 102016 IT-Sicherheit
Link zum Portal: https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/c33e008c-aecf-45e9-83fc-b78fd3df7dd8