Safe or Scam? An Empirical Simulation Study on Trust Indicators in Online Shopping

Sebastian Schrittwieser, Andreas Ekelhart, Esther Seidl, Edgar Weippl

2024

Abstract

Complaints from Internet users about online shopping scams have increased significantly in recent years. An indication of the trustworthiness of a store can be obtained by a user on the basis of a number of trust indicators, such as available payment methods or availability and correctness of contact information. In this paper, we analyzed the behavior of 646 participants during online shopping with regards to non-technical trust indicators. Our work is based on an online shopping simulation study including one trustworthy and two scam store imitations. By automatically tracking the participants’ behavior, we found that only a minority of users pay attention to trust indicators and most participants of the study purchased in an obvious scam store (28%) – most likely due to its lower prices. Personal (age, gender, educational level, frequency of online purchase or Internet usage at work) and contextual (time pressure) factors did not significantly influence the choice.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Schrittwieser S., Ekelhart A., Seidl E. and Weippl E. (2024). Safe or Scam? An Empirical Simulation Study on Trust Indicators in Online Shopping. In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT; ISBN 978-989-758-709-2, SciTePress, pages 560-567. DOI: 10.5220/0012852600003767

in Bibtex Style

@conference{secrypt24,
author={Sebastian Schrittwieser and Andreas Ekelhart and Esther Seidl and Edgar Weippl},
title={Safe or Scam? An Empirical Simulation Study on Trust Indicators in Online Shopping},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT},
year={2024},
pages={560-567},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0012852600003767},
isbn={978-989-758-709-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT
TI - Safe or Scam? An Empirical Simulation Study on Trust Indicators in Online Shopping
SN - 978-989-758-709-2
AU - Schrittwieser S.
AU - Ekelhart A.
AU - Seidl E.
AU - Weippl E.
PY - 2024
SP - 560
EP - 567
DO - 10.5220/0012852600003767
PB - SciTePress