Our purpose in this article is to present the concept of electronic agent used in e-commerce and its impact on consumer satisfaction. Electronic agents represent the future of electronic business. They help the consumers in an environment where all the information is available but hard to deal...

France's early adoption of Minitel and EDI in the 1980s was both a stimulus and an inhibitor to Internet-based e-commerce. It hindered the adoption of the Internet, but it also created the conditions for a rapid catch up when France switched to the Internet in 1997. The French were already open...

It is often (implicitly) assumed that e-commerce behavior is similar in countries with a similar culture in terms of Hofstede's dimensions. Through a study of e-commerce behavior of 969 private consumers and company representatives on 50 products, this paper proves there are actually significant...

Trust is a crucial factor in e-commerce. However, consumers are less likely to trust unknown Web sites. This study explores how less-familiar e-commerce Web sites can use branding alliances and Web site quality to increase the likelihood of initial consumer trust. We use the associative network...

Efficiency arguments explain why commercial intermediaries exist and will continue to be involved in the exchanges despite the spread of digital networks. Commercial intermediaries provide producers and consumers with a set of information, logistic, securization and insurance (and liquidity)...

Lack of trust has been identified as the major barrier to the growth of electronic commerce. Building trust is essential for the success of web vendors, especially less-known ones. If trust is a sine qua non condition of e-commerce development, then understanding its determinants should be a...

This paper develops a scale to measure consumer trust towards a web merchant. For this purpose, two studies were carried out. A total of 430 valid observations were used for the scale development. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were performed to assess the psychometric properties...