Trust and relationship building in electronic commerce

In e-commerce, trust becomes an essential prerequisite for customer relatio nship building. Drawn from established theoretical work on trust and relati onship marketing, a model is proposed aiming to help in highlighting the di fferences between traditional and e-commerce and to facilitate thinking as to how trust can be built in virtual environments. Conceptualized in the co ntext of an electronic servicescape, the model helps to demonstrate how age nt and virtual reality technologies can facilitate the expressiveness requi red for the formation of trust through iterative interaction with promises being made, enabled and fulfilled.