Development of an intelligent e-commerce assurance model to promote trust in online shopping environment

Abstract

Electronic commerce (e-commerce) markets provide benefits for both buyers and sellers; however, because of cyber security risks consumers are reluctant to transact online. Trust in e-commerce is paramount for adoption. Trust as a subject for research has been a term considered in depth by numerous researchers in various fields of study, including psychology and information technology. Various models have been developed in e-commerce to alleviate consumer fears, thus promoting trust in online environments. Third-party web seals and online scanning tools are some of the existing models used in e-commerce environments, but they have some deficiencies, e.g. failure to incorporate compliance, which need to be addressed. This research proposes an e-commerce assurance model for safe online shopping. The machine learning model is called the Page ranking analytical hierarchy process (PRAHP). PRAHP builds complementary strengths of the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and Page ranking (PR) techniques to evaluate the trustworthiness of web attributes. The attributes that are assessed are Adaptive legislation, Adaptive International Organisation for Standardisation Standards, Availability, Policy and Advanced Security login. The attributes were selected based on the literature reviewed from accredited journals and some of the reputable e-commerce websites. PRAHP’s paradigms were evaluated extensively through detailed experiments on business-to-business, business-to-consumer, cloud-based and general e-commerce websites. The results of the assessments were validated by customer inputs regarding the website. The reliability and robustness of PRAHP was tested by varying the damping factor and the inbound links. In all the experiments, the results revealed that the model provides reliable results to guide customers in making informed purchasing decisions. The research also reveals hidden e-commerce topics that have not received attention, which generates knowledge and opens research questions for future researchers. These ultimately made significant contributions in e-commerce assurance, in areas such as security and compliance through the fusing of AHP and PR, integrated into a decision table for alleviating trustworthiness anxiety in various e-commerce transacting partners, e-commerce platforms and markets.