Electronic Commerce Relationships: 

DEFINITION OF TRUST

Trust is the foundation of commerce.

You simply cannot have commerce without it. Sometimes it's law, contract, and regulation that generate the trust; examples of this are the "truth-in-lending" law for mortgages in the United States, or the "lemon laws" many states have passed that protect consumers when purchasing a car. Sometimes it's a company policy, such as a money-back guarantee or the store automatically accepting the return of goods. Sometimes it's personal reputation or an established long-term relationship. 

Trust determines the space for future interactions between parties. Distrust closes down possibilities - trust opens them up. The trust factor opens up or closes down the pace and nature of electronic commerce (EC) growth. Today, EC is well beyond the take-off stage but is still not widely established as part of the mainstream of business process. There's a lack of regulatory and legal protections in many areas, especially in consumer transactions over the Internet. We have limited experience in how to define contracts in the electronic environment. Companies do not yet know what policies to set, and there's a lack of long-term history of relationship and no face-to-face contact. Every story about fraud on, say, eBay's Web auction site, or breakdowns in e*Trade's online securities trading services contributes to customer concern, just as familiarity and frequency of use of credit cards online is reducing many customers' worries: In 1998, most surveys indicated that around 60% of people using an online service would either log off or lie if asked to give private information.

In the business-to-business sphere, there are far more established mechanisms for ensuring trust. The precursors of Web commerce-value-added networks that offer electronic data interchange services, bank payment networks, and industry supply chain relationship networks, for instance-have built up legal and technical protections, offer specialized software and services, and also are very sophisticated in their Control and audit processes. That's because their users demand these: Many of them will not move to the often cheaper and more far-reaching Web commerce until they are sure it fully meets their trust criteria. It's no exaggeration to say that trust, more than technology, drives the growth of EC in all its forms. 

This book is about designing trust mechanisms for EC especially concerning payments over the Internet. We see this as a source of competitive advantage. Our first chapters look at the nature of EC. We start with a straightforward definition of trust: confidence in the business relationship. We extend this definition to include some definitions of risk and focus in the relationships that are directly handled through computers and telecommunications. Together, all these create and maintain the trust bond: security, safety, honesty, consumer protection laws, contracts, privacy, reputation, brand, mutual self-interest, and many other factors. We want to help you build them for EC.

Trust is so multi-faceted that it can be hard to view it as a design issue. Instead, we generally think of it in common sense terms and observe the mechanics of trust design only when they break down or are missing. It's hard, for instance, for many managers to accept that you can create trust relationships with dishonest people; they pride themselves on being able to tell if someone's honest by looking them in the eye and testing their handshake. That's what con men love, of course. It's equally hard for many of us to insist on a written contract with a housepainter who is so nice and has done so much excellent work for us before. In the world of EC, it's increasingly bewildering to determine if a document is valid, if the law protects you against an error made by a Web supplier, or even if the supplier is who he describes himself as being.

None of this is new in principle, of course. Business, since the beginning of time, has been based on some form of trust. Looking back to the very first transaction which may well have been the exchange of animal pelts or food for shelter-there had to be some level of trust between the exchanging parties before the deal could proceed. Later on, it was trust in the currency of exchange; that the seashell or iron bar the seller received had real value. (That the dollar is called a "buck" was because a major exchange item in barter was a deerskin. In many instance, that was a more-trustworthy currency than the bills issued by the flood of banks that grew up and often vanished in the early years of colonial America.)

The cavemen didn't have receipts and purchase orders, so there was no opportunity to use documents as instruments in commerce. Those were trust based-trust that an invoice for goods already delivered would be paid, trust in a letter of credit issued by a bank that enables a manufacturer to release goods for unloading at a port. In today's world of EC, it's trust that the sender of an electronic data interchange (EDI) transaction is the party claimed on the message, that your credit card numbers won't be stolen, that your Internet transaction is private, and many others.

Trust, therefore, seems to have developed from the simple concept that "I won't steal from you if you don't steal from me" (an interesting concept, especially in modem business ethics). As society and commerce have evolved, the concept of trust has become more complex and something that is not easily defined or quantified. It has now moved from the face-to-face relationships to often anonymous movement of logic bits. The implications of this shift are essential to the success of EC. Whether at a personal or corporate level, the need to understand and define "trust" in this new context becomes the point from which all future EC transactions extend.

Trust, not technology, paces EC change.

Take the emergence of the Automated Teller Machine (ATM), for instance. The technology, reliability, and performance issues were ironed out by the late 1970s. As ATMs proliferated, the resistance to them in the consumer market baffled bankers. With the ATM, one of the first true applications of EC, a bank's customers could have access to their account and money, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The benefits, surely, were obvious. The missing element turned out to be related to whether the consumers trusted the ATM system, not the underlying technology or institution. The typical consumer was reluctant to commit to banking electronically-with a machine instead of a human. There were entire conferences devoted to the question of how to break the "33% Barrier," relating to the one third of most customers who were early adopters of nearly everything, and how to convince the remaining two thirds to become users of the system.

Until the early 1980s, the ATM had a struggle justifying its existence. One of the authors of this book was asked by one bank to review its ATM investment, which most of the top management team viewed as a blunder for which someone should be fired! This was yet another technology "bleeding edge" fiasco. They saw it as a technology solution looking for a problem. No, it was part of a new way of doing business that rested on a new type and degree of customer trust. At some point, the trust question was resolved. The banking community was, over time, able to create or design trust for its users. First, it improved security and built a track record of operations. It made the ATM both easy and safe to use. As more and more people tried it out, its reputation grew, along with its convenience. New laws, policies, and procedures handled lost cards, contested transactions, and password management.

The same historical process has occurred with credit cards. Today, we perhaps are overtrustful in giving our card numbers and expiration dates over the phone or leaving them on file with a travel agent. We do this because we trust the "system." One of the key trust design mechanisms here was the change in U.S. Federal laws to limit customer liability for misuse of a credit card to just $50. Previously, it was open ended, and you were liable for all or any charges incurred up until the moment you realized it had been lost or stolen and reported this to your bank (of course, in the pre-800-number days, if you found this out on Saturday evening, the rest of the weekend was spent in a panic.)

Would we have 1-800-FLOWERS, Domino's Pizza, and telephone ordering of goods as such a routine element of our own everyday life if the old laws still applied? Would the technology of call centers and catalogs have taken off so fast and far?

According to many surveys, over half of us don't trust the Internet and won't use a credit card to make purchases over it. Yet it's more secure than using the phone; in fact, there seems to be more cell phone fraud than Internet fraud. Even though the Internet is more secure, by using encryption techniques, people don't feel safe. Credit cards took off, like ATMs, when new trust design mechanisms encouraged people to try them out and as the security and reliability translated into a sense of safety and confidence. It's not enough for a company to say, "But trust us-we're honest!" Say, "You can trust us because we know. what we're doing and that means you don't have to worry about us being honest. By the way, we're also very honest."

Designing trust demands going beyond the often simplistic view of it as just values: integrity, honesty, and sincerity. It's much more complex than this; it's a discipline and skill. There are some very basic questions for which managers need answers in order for trust to become the base for building a competitive identity and organizational advantage:

• What are the dynamics of trust in action, that is, in everyday commercial operations?
  
  
• How can a firm design for trust for all the parties in the relationship - in both buyer and seller?
  
  
• What are the costs and risks associated with conditions of trust and of distrust and what are the dangers of over-trusting and under-trusting?
  
  
• What organizational structures and processes facilitate trust? 
  
  
• How do you build a trust advantage through "service and operations?"
  
  
• How do we build effective partnerships between parties who are often at the same time competitors to combine trust and self-interest?
  
  
• How do we best handle the dilemmas of balancing trust with suitable monitoring, surveillance, and protection against dishonest employees and outside parties?
  
  
• How do you trust people you've never met? (One of the key issues for the emergence of EC and the Internet)
  
  
• What changes must be made in formal procedures for contracting, sharing of information, and project coordination?
  
  
• What is the management agenda for building the trust advantage?

THE BASICS OF TRUST

Managers can't begin to answer these questions without asking the overriding one: What exactly is trust? It's so easy to talk about, so hard to pin down. It's a topic widely studied in business, political science, sociology, psychology, medicine, philosophy, law, and economics. It's not an exaggeration to summarize the basic conclusion in all these fields as "trust is becoming more and more important but we still can't really say what it exactly is."

There are many ways of defining trust and thus many perceptions of it. This leads to an overall picture of confusion, ambiguity, conflicting interpretations, and absence of reliable principles. For many business practitioners, trust is mainly equated with behavior: reliability and predictability. Can I really count on you? This view is well grounded in their own organizational experiences: Businesses are interested in results, not motives. For others, it's more equated with personal traits: attitude, confidence, and interpersonal skills; here, the emphasis is on individual intentions. Can I really believe you?

Trust is thus variously defined in both theory and practice in terms of interpersonal skills, self-trust, reliability, rationality, faith, psychological states, self-confidence, competence, expectations, and good will. So, at one extreme are the views of trust as a personal and interior response. If that is so, then there's minimal scope for viewing trust as a formal element in relationship design, in that there's nothing you as a firm can do: Either your customer or employee perceives you as trustworthy or he or she simply doesn't. At the other extreme of conception, trust is merely about rational assessments of reliability, in which case it's a redundant concept. If it were either of these extremes, it wouldn't be so central to the language of everyday life and be moving so rapidly to the center of business life and EC. Our view of trust focuses on reliability rather than on honesty and sincerity. The key to trust is to balance collaboration and control President Reagan's famous quip about his view of how to handle nuclear disarmament with the USSR is subtly deep in its insight: "trust but verify." In the context of EC, it often needs restatement as "verify, so you can trust."

We often take trust for granted in relationships. It's generally automatically viewed as a fairly simple commodity and a positive virtue. Yet, the very notion of trust as good and distrust as bad are open to challenge. Distrust may also reflect personal competence as a trustor and a caring about standards; the widely reported increase in distrust of politicians may thus be more a matter of citizens being more aware of the standards they expect in performance, more knowledgeable about what's going on, and more concerned about trust breakdowns, rather than indicating some radical decline in the standards of public life. We sometimes acknowledge the legitimacy of distrust by paying someone to handle situations for us and take on the trust burden. We get a signature notarized or select a broker who is "licensed , " for instance. The more complex a transaction is, the more likely it is we choose this approach, even when it may be cheaper to do it ourselves. The most obvious example is selling a home. The 6-8% commission to brokers may seem unreasonable for the little work they do, especially when you can list the house yourself on the Internet and thus handle the entire sale through EC. Most of us are uneasy about doing this, not because of the purchase element but those elements that center around trust and verification: inspections, title search, contract conditions, escrow, and the like. When real estate dealers talk about someone being a fizzboo (FSBO: "for sale by owner"), they don't mean it as a category but as a shorthand for "poor idiot."

Complexity compounds the reliance on others to ensure reliability, safety, and surety. The use of "direct exchange" trust (barter or similar activities) has now widely extended into "intermediated" trust, where a third party acts as a broker between the buyer and seller. Very little "barter" or direct business happens anymore. Most of us in our personal or business lives use a form of intermediated trust to conduct our business and ourselves. We use money, whether in the form of legal tender (coin and cash), a check, bank draft or money order, or a credit card. We are comfortable with the process of trusting the forms of payment and exchange that are common today. However, as EC becomes more pervasive, we have to reexamine our expectations and criteria for what we trust and can accept for payment.

For example, if you were offered payment in an unfamiliar or highly unstable currency, you may say "No, I don't want that kind of money-pay me in local currency." If you live in the United States, the trust and confidence you have in your local money and in the backer, the U.S. Government, may be well placed. On the other hand, if you were in Russia, where payment in rubles is "required," but not always desired, the Government's backing of the currency doesn't create a similar level of confidence and trust. How does one conduct commerce when the currency can't be relied on? Simple. You seek one that you can. In the Russian case, there is an enormous percentage of commerce that is conducted (illegally, from the government's view) in U.S. dollars. Even though the U.S. dollar is a foreign currency, a Russian business has trust in the backer and in the value and the stability of the currency. As long as a token of exchange is trusted, it's used. If the trust disappears for whatever reason, it stops being used. The most famous instance of this truism was the tulip bulb mania in Holland in the Seventeenth century. Bulbs were like gold, selling for as much as $60,000 in today's currency equivalent. Then, the bubble burst, and they became just bulbs. They were the very same bulbs as the day before but now were bulbs not money.

This comparison is of more than historical and anecdotal interest. It illustrates one of the major problems of EC today: what financial instruments will be accepted as trustable exchange tokens. There have been many efforts to create new forms of electronic currency through micropayments, smart wallets, digital cash, and e-tokens. None of them has succeeded to date and in early 1999, one of the most promising innovators, Digicash, declared bankruptcy just a year or so after it was being hailed in the business press as the harbinger of the new economy's handling of payments.

Trust is fragile, hard to build, and easily lost. With EC, there are so many areas of fragility: payments, contracts, security, and financial and legal recourse. The converse of this is that when trust is iron-strong as it is today across the world for U.S. hundred-dollar bills, the domain of commercial relationship expands in size and possibilities.

TRUST AS A FOUNDATION FOR EC

EC is now rapidly creating the introduction of new tools for conducting business and payment, which in turn generates new demands that often are not adequately catered to by established tools. The extreme example of the latter here is that there is absolutely no way you can really trust "news" you get off the Internet or be sure that the copyright of anything you list can be protected. This is creating many problems in journalism and publishing. In mid-1999, a well-known professor in political science issued a broadcast e-mail message to the academic community, stating that a "fact" he had published was simply untrue. He operated by the established trust mechanisms of researchers and the research process. The fact had appeared in another professor's Web article. But that professor was a fake identity, and the fact a deliberate libel. Anyone familiar with the often arcane rituals of academic refereeing, citations, peer review, and copyrighting can see how the Net at the very same time opens up the creation, dissemination, and sharing of knowledge-that is, increases academic intellectual commerce-while destroying many of its trust foundations.

That must not happen for EC for the obvious reason that if it does, there won't be any commerce. A direct analogy here is with Value-Jet, the airline whose safety record was revealed after a plane crash as less than stellar. Trust died and so did its business. Luckily, it's far easier to protect and validate business assets and transactions than it is to do the same for academic intellectual capital and copyright. The issues, though, are the same. Charles Schwab's online securities trading service is one of the major 1998-99 successes of EC on the Internet. Yet, in a context where the basic drive of this new industry that now amounts for over 25% of all trades has been price, Schwab dominates the market at a commission of $29.99 versus as low as $6 for other players. Talk to any Schwab customers and they'll quickly tell you they pay the premium because of the firm's superbly responsive processes for handling outages, errors in trades (including the customer's), and customer "care." They feel they are paying for peace of mind and the confidence that they will be looked after.

Building peace of mind and confidence is what makes technology into EC. The trust paces the technology's impact. After the ATM, the plastic-card-based payment systems that relate to credit card systems are now becoming payment tools for "direct debit." Direct debit works similarly to the ATM, except that instead of the card removing cash from a machine, charged to your checking or savings account, it is used at a terminal at a merchant location, where a purchase is charged against the buyer's account and credited directly to the merchant's, even if each of the parties deals with different banks. Again, this is as much a trust extension of the commercial interaction as a technical one. The next step is the use of a "smart , " or "stored-value" card, which has a microchip embedded in it and can store money in an electronic "cash" format. Again, the technology is stable and reliable, but the issue of trust-along with relevance to the consumer, ease of use, and costs-will decide the stored value card's fate.

Another issue of trust exists in the management of supply chain relationships, one of the central forces in EC. When a manufacturer begins a relationship with a supplier, there are a multitude of components that require levels of trust, from both the supplier and customer perspectives. There must be trust in the component quality, consistency, on-time delivery, and so on. But there's also a need for trust in how breakdowns in the supply line will be handled. Commerce is fundamentally built on recurrence: repeat business and established relationships. Think of your own relationship with credit card firms, car manufacturers, airlines, or retailers. Probably 99 of every 100 interactions you have with them are completed with no mishap. It's how they handle number 100 that establishes your future trust in them.

Remember the great Tylenol scare of the 1980s, where a still unknown sociopath tampered with several bottles of Tylenol (putting cyanide in them) and created an enormous concern for the manufacturer as to what the source problem was-not to mention the public outcry and impact on sales. Was it in the manufacturing process or had the cyanide been added afterward? An army of people was mobilized to discover the problem, resulting in the conclusion that the product had been tampered with after manufacture. We now can "trust" the fact that Tylenol, like virtually all other consumable medical products, is now sold in tamper-resistant containers. Perhaps more importantly for the maker's trust relationship, the company took immediate and complete responsibility for recalling the product, at significant expense. It didn't deny responsibility, even though it wasn't responsible. The Tylenol case is widely taught in business schools as a model of leadership. We comment on it here as an example of trust as part of the business brand; Johnson and Johnson gained brand identity for the product because of this added trust premium.

EC faces many problems analogous to the Tylenol example, even if not as dramatic and far-reaching in their implications. Electronic transaction systems are designed for recurrence. They aim at levels of reliability in the 99.999% range. They are convenience factories. They reduce the costs of processing a credit card transaction to pennies and the time to a few seconds. They make it easy for a retailer to handle millions of inquiries and thousands of purchases smoothly and simply.

But they are too-often poorly positioned to handle exceptions. This is shown in the experiences of customers in online shopping during the 1998 Christmas season. Sales were up by a factor of four over the same period for 1997, indicating that a new critical mass of buyers has been tapped. This success was offset by a halving in levels of satisfaction. The New York Times summarized the situation in January 1999 as "Online Customer Service? It's Pathetic!" The failures were almost all ones of poor handling of customer queries-other surveys show that only about 15% of companies responded to e-mail messages within a day-dealing with incorrect shipments and informing customers if an ordered item was out of stock. Given that many purchases were last-minute Christmas gifts, the last of these was particularly annoying, indicating poor coordination between marketing and production/order fulfillment.

In business-to-business EC, the situation is generally far better, largely because it builds on a larger body of experience, but the same issues apply. EC is about commerce first and foremost. It is a system of (1) technology service access and processing tools; (2) processes behind the technology to ensure excellent completion of the commercial transaction; (3) sales, credit, service, and account management support; and (4) trust mechanisms, including policies on refunds, security, and many other tools unique to EC. These make up a system; neglecting any one puts the others at risk.

The Trusted System

All these lead to the essential issue that emerges from EC: What is the effect of EC on my own business and on me as an individual, and how do I establish a level of confidence and trust in it? Conversely, what is the effect of my EC operations on my customer's business, and how do I establish a base of confidence and trust? It helps to step back and take a more abstract look at the dimensions of trust in answering these two intensely practical questions.

Trust has become more and more central to business for four reasons that have nothing directly to do with morality and ethics:

1. Complexity: The more complex your environment, the more you have no choice but to trust, because you can't understand and do everything yourself.
   
   
2. Interdependence: The more people, steps, and intermediaries involved, the more you have to depend on others whose competence and behaviors directly affect the outcome.
   
   
3. The trust economy: The evolution of business over the past 40 years has been to make different forms of trust the differentiator: Trust in the product for the 1970s, trust in the transaction for the 1980s, and now trust in the relationship.
   
   
4. Telecommunications networks in general and the Internet in particular: Telecommunications, especially, the Web at the same time increases complexity, coordination, and relationships while removing many of the established trust mechanisms of commerce, increasing the risk to all parties and hence requiring entirely new mechanisms and practices.

Each of these forces in itself raises the salience of trust, but their interaction is what is making trust the new currency of business. The following applies to just about every firm that has more than 50 or so employees and to many firms that are even smaller:

Complexity

The company's business environment is more and more uncertain. Prediction, even in the short term, is difficult, and the firm must be ready to respond to business changes quickly. Cycle times have become shorter and shorter. Customers' expectations are growing ever higher, and they demand ever-increasing levels of service. Organizational structures must be kept flexible, with more emphasis on cross-functional processes and teamwork. It is harder and harder in many areas for the company to locate skilled staff; "intellectual capital" is recognized as the prime asset in an environment of change and complexity, with the "learning" organization a new priority. In other areas, the firm has moved through a sometimes almost-continuous flow of downsizing and outsourcing, with all the disruptions, policy issues, human resource concerns, and impacts on both victims and survivors. Regulation, environmental issues, and healthcare management consume more and more time and resources.

The nature of competition is changing, with many new and nontraditional players from outside the industry and many global entrants. Channels of distribution are becoming more complex and varied, including phone service, the Internet, and electronic procurement. Customer and market segmentation pose new challenges, with no more "average" customers. Information technology, previously delegated to the firm's information services function, is now a central element in almost all elements of operations, with many business executives feeling uncomfortable, whether they understand the issues and risks or not.

This company - an increasingly typical one-can respond effectively to the demands of complexity by loosening its controls over employees and encouraging and facilitating collaboration, teams, and real employee empowerment. Managers have to trust their subordinates more than ever. There's no time or expertise to monitor them or review their decisions. Instead, we all have to ask, "Who knows how to get this done?" In other words, "Who do I trust to get it done?"

Interdependency

The firm is involved in a number of partnerships and alliances, to handle shared sourcing, joint development, and distribution. It is a member of industry associations, consortia for regional development, and other shared interest groups. Key customers and suppliers work together on many issues, to the extent that they cooperate in the morning and compete in the afternoon. They jointly share information and plan functions that were previously the domain of each individual party; those shared functions include inventory management, quality control, and forward planning for materials and distribution. The company has a number of long-term outsourcing projects underway, which require continuing review and adjustment as the original business conditions and contract agreements must be adapted to changing situations. In high-tech and engineering-dependent firms, there is constant movement of staff within the industry, with both frequent sharing of intellectual property through licensing agreements and frequent legal skirmishes about protection of patent rights and of proprietary information when key employees move to a competitor. In many instances, competitors have to work together, because customers demand it as a condition of contracts in such areas as telecommunications and information systems integration.

Is this what some have called "Coopetition" - cooperation with competitors? It's the basis of the business game in Silicon Valley. As the Chief Operating Officer of one of the leading business-to-business EC players told one of the authors in early 1999, "You're only as strong as your weakest ally and you're kidding yourself if you think you can go it alone." And as another top manager in the Valley told him, "It's a real bitch when you know that you and your nearest competitor have no choice but to trust each other or you're both in trouble."

The Trust Economy

We are rapidly moving toward a trust economy that has progressed through three eras: Product, Service, and now Relationship. All of these pose heavy trust demands. The firm is challenged to make its products fully trustable: quality, warranties, after-sales service, and so forth. It must achieve ever-increasing levels of trustable service: guaranteed delivery time, fast turnaround, reduction in error rates, convenience, security, and availability. Increasingly, it is looking to establish stronger ties with customers and suppliers. as many service and product elements become commoditized. The customer is no longer an anonymous statistic. The more commoditized the product, the more important that service becomes as the premium item. (You don't phone Domino's Pizza because it offers the world's best cheese.) The more commonplace a service is, the more important the relationship becomes as the differentiator among the many providers.

In the 1970s, consumers lost trust in the quality of American manufacturing: cars, consumer electronics, and household goods. Toyota, Sony, and other Japanese firms were the gainers. Total Quality Management, invented in the United States and applied in Japan, created a trust premium for them and a decade-long catch-up race for their U.S. competitors. In the 1980s, ATMs, 800 numbers, and credit cards generated a convenience society and a new trust advantage; you could be sure you could get cash in Swedish krone through an ATM in Stockholm, pay for your hotel in Paris, and order pizza from Domino's. You don't have to worry about traveling anywhere in most of the world if you have your credit card and know the phone number for calling the country using your AT&T, MCI, or Sprint calling card.

So, you now take product quality for granted when you go to Circuit City to buy a VCR. Indeed, you could pick one at random and trust it's reliable. Even if it turns out to have some problem, you can return it for any reason within 30 days. You can pay for it by credit card and indeed could order it over the phone without even seeing it. We now take product quality and convenience in transactions as a given of everyday life. This trust had to be worked at to build and keep. Even now, banks, retailers, airlines, and credit card firms vary widely in how well they live up to their service promise. But all in all, ours is a convenience society with very high standards of quality in most types of services and products.

What happens when all leading competitors have excellent quality and convenient, reliable transaction handling? These features then lose their premium value. Trust in relationship becomes the differentiator. That is now the case in financial services, airlines, retailing, and manufacturing. It's the very basis of EC, in that it depends fundamentally on relationships, not transactions, as the basis for long-term success. If a company offers only transactions, it's simply an online convenience store that can compete only on price. The buyer can use a search engine to locate the lowest price, which puts pressure on the company to cut its own price. Just as customers see its price, so do competitors. It's a no win game to be in. Also, the cost of acquiring customers is so high at present, that without repeat business, the company won't be around for long; in April 1999, the customer acquisition cost for Amazon.com was over 20% of revenues.

This is why Amazon's entire strategy is based on building repeat business through providing impeccable service, encouraging collaboration with readers and authors, first adding CDs and videos and then other products that its customer base trusts Amazon to sell, and always keeping customers fully informed about the status of their orders. Charles Schwab & Co., Cisco, Dell, and the other firms who have made their name an EC brand follow the same strategy: build and cement the relationship. By definition, relationship means trust. These are the trust brands of the new online economy.