The Power of Trust in the Relationship between Online Shopping Experience and Perceived Shopping Value

The main goal of this study is to investigate the importance of trust as a mediator between shopping experience and shopping value. Previous studies on utilitarian shopping value and hedonic shopping value have focused on the antecedents and outcomes of those shopping values. Also, although the role of trust has been studied a lot in the series of studies on online shopping mall, most of them focus on the relationship with intention to shop or use and there are few studies on the mechanism in which consumers get to have shopping value. This study tries to see how trust can boost utilitarian shopping value and hedonic shopping value which can lead to consumer’s loyalty to the shopping mall. A structural equation model is proposed and examined through a survey research to investigate the role of trust in forming perceived shopping value. One model included the trust variable as a mediator and the other excluded it. The comparison of R2 verified that the first model had a better fit. The results of the study show that the level of experience has a significant impact on both utilitarian and hedonic shopping values in the case of the model without the mediator. But experience has an insignificant or a partially significant effect on utilitarian and hedonic shopping values when trust mediates experience and shopping values. Finally, the implications and limitations are further discussed.