Trust Revisited
Christmas is a good time to think about online consumer trust. Comscore predicts online retail will top $100 billion in 2006. That’s good news, to be sure. But while the horses are at full gallop, it makes sense to look out ahead for obstacles or other things that might trip us up.
A few months back I speculated about the enlarging role of trust in electronic commerce. As an SEO dabbler, I had taken note of Google Trustrank, which accords trust using the deceptively simple formula: “Whomever is trusted by the trusted shall be trusted.” This fundamentally democratic approach to deciding which web pages to display in search results inspired me to think about other applications of trust-based schemes that might help stem online consumer fraud and other persistent consumer detractors.
- From Part 1: The Business of Trust
By choosing to adopt Trustrank, Google is telling us that it is going to give us its opinion whenever we hit the “Search” button. Further, as regards specific Web sites and domains, Google is telling us that its decision to include a given page in search results will be determined by whether or not Google has given its trust.
For the immediate moment, the factors that Google considers when making up its mind about a given Web site are limited to the list of things the Spider may determine when it crawls. But that list of factors is going to grow, as is the list of companies that are going to adopt “trust assessment” as part of their operations. Google is one pioneering example of a trust-based model in action. But already there are others, and in each case the dynamic is the same:
1.Trust Providers sit between larger Trust Providers and the consumer public.
2. The size of a Trust Provider is determined by the number and size of its “constituents”.
3. Constituents are customers, partners, and those who give links to or otherwise support a Trust Provider.
4. One Trust Provider with only a few large constituents may have equal weight with another Trust Provider with many small constituents.
5. In the same way that there are benefits to associating with the well-trusted, there are penalties for association with the dis-trusted.
And, so on…
If all of this is beginning to sound a lot like politics, there’s good reason for it. A trust-based scheme for electronic commerce shares many of the principles of democracy:
1. A small number of “representatives” will be “voted” into a position of influence by the many.
2. Everybody who “registers” may vote.
3. There shall be no representation without taxation.
Politics, even in the form of Democracy, is of course not perfect. Like anything we do, our systems of government reflect human nature. I believe, however, especially in light of the current impasse, that the benefits of embracing this “change” at this moment far outweigh the disadvantages.
For example… On many fronts, online commerce is at odds with government. By making both a part of a continuous hierarchy of trust, we should be able to fix some of that. Consumer dis-trust stems from the fact that it’s so hard to know who you’re dealing with when you press click. Even business-to-business commerce is often transacted now between parties who never meet face to face. The institution of a formal Trustrank system will allow everyone, both consumers and businesses, to evaluate a prospective purchase or partnership in light of public information.
In this second paper, I wanted to explore some of the specific kinds of businesses for which a trust-based commerce scheme might create opportunity.
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Part 2: Trust-based commerce models.