Applying virtual reality for trust-building e-commerce environments

The application of virtual reality in e-commerce has enormous potential for transforming online shopping into a real-world equivalent. However, the growing research interest focuses on virtual reality technology adoption for the development of e-commerce environments without addressing social and behavioral facets of online shopping such as trust. At the same time, trust is a critical success factor for e-commerce and remains an open issue as to how it can be accomplished within an online store. This paper shows that the use of virtual reality for online shopping environments offers an advanced customer experience compared to conventional web stores and enables the formation of customer trust. The paper presents a prototype virtual shopping mall environment, designed on principles derived by an empirically tested model for building trust in e-commerce. The environment is evaluated with an empirical study providing evidence and explaining that a virtual reality shopping environment would be preferred by customers over a conventional web store and would facilitate the assessment of the e-vendor’s trustworthiness.