The Influence of Discussions in Virtual Communities on Consumers' Purchasing Behaviors in E-commerce: Implications for Trust Sources, Trust Building, and Consumer Purchase Intention

Virtual Community and E-commerce are both new research area which is becoming popular in IS academia. In most of research papers, virtual community and e-commerce are talked separately in different stream. Since many e-commerce websites contain a virtual community, we combine these two together to consider whether discussions in virtual communities can influence people’s online shopping behaviors. This paper bases on literature of trust to propose that there are several types of trust sources – poster trust sources, consumer trust sources, and environment trust sources – engender consumer trust in posters in a virtual community. In addition, consumer trust in posters can affect consumer trust in sellers who referred in the posters’ discussion contents, and then affect consumers’ purchase intention further.