A new study suggests online consumers judge a site’s or a software’s credibility by its name–and the more specialized the better, reports Futurity.com.
Researchers randomly assigned a group of 124 undergraduate students to buy wine with websites, recommendation agents, and computer monitors that were labeled either as specialized wine purchasing-technologies or as general e-commerce technologies.
Participants who answered a questionnaire following the experiment reported that they trusted the specialized technology significantly more than they trusted general websites, recommendation agents, and computers.
Credibility appears to increase when participants used more than one specialized tool–or layer–at the same time for the wine-buying task. For example, Sundar says that the participants trusted a website more if it features a specialized recommendation agent.
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