Building Trust for E-Commerce: Collaborating Label Bureaus

Abstract

Consumers develop trust in a business through reports about that business from trusted third parties or other consumers. For the consumer to develop trust in e-commerce, a flexible system is required that rates ecommerce sites along multiple dimensions (such as delivery, return policies, etc.) and allows the consumer to determine which dimension(s) is of importance at that moment in time. These rating should be done by trusted third parties and stored in Label Bureaus. A prototype architecture has been developed that supports distributed Label Bureaus and multiple rating systems that rate along multiple dimensions. The architecture is based on a Label Engine and an Application Server that retrieves labels from one or more Label Bureaus and applies a rating algorithm to merge the various rating systems. An architecture that supports third party labeling allows the consumer to develop a rational trust level in unknown businesses.