Measuring the Role of Trust in M-Commerce Acceptance: An Empirical Analysis in Context of Pakistan

With the emergence of internet and WWW (World Wide Web), traditional businesses got a new opportunity to compete globally. A new term of M-Commerce (Mobile Commerce) emerged and set a new trend in commerce and business. Traditional bricks-and-mortar businesses became e-business (electronic business) with the help of ICT (Information & Communication Technology) tools. Evidences from literature review suggest that there has been little growth in the acceptance of M-commerce in developing economies such as Pakistan as compared to developed economies. There are doubts that users of M-commerce demonstrate a lack of enthusiasm, which may be because of the lack of trustworthiness. Based on the well-known and widely used TAM (Technology Acceptance Model), this study provides the theoretical underpinning and empirical evidence between the relationships of trust construct with the adoption of M-commerce in Pakistan. A cross sectional questionnaire survey was conducted to collect data from M-commerce users in Pakistan to check the influence of trust. After the analysis of 390 valid responses obtained results indicate that trust and other constructs of TAM are related and there is positive and significant role of trust in the acceptance of M-commerce in Pakistan. Results also prove the hypothesized relationship among all constructs of proposed Model.


INTRODUCTION
opportunities for doing business and commerce activities with the help of mobile handheld devices [2]. M-commerce can be defined as the exchanging of services and goods or selling and buying of services and goods by using wireless handheld devices including smart phones, cellular phones, tablet computing devices, personal data assistants, and laptop computers [3]. Although unique features of M-commerce provide abundant flexibility to R apid developments in the field of Information and M-commerce technologies has provided new opportunities to business organizations to go beyond physical boundaries and step ahead towards the fast take-off in electronic (E-commerce) and Mcommerce. According to [1] the future of business transactions are now in M-commerce activities. In recent past M-commerce has emerged to be new horizons of its users regarding time and place, but it is found that still customers have been reluctant to adopt it [4]. Since, in M-commerce the medium of transactions is actually a virtual environment, users usually feel uncomfortable to provide their personal and financial details, due to lack of trust, uncertainty and potential risk associated with virtual online environments [5]. Large scale adoption of commercial activities on the web is perceived to be limited because of mistrust between the buyers and sellers [5].
The role of trust is important in M-commerce since most of the time users are unaware of the vendor's credibility of the service delivery.
Mobile phone usage in Pakistan is increasing very rapidly due to cheaper rates of telecom services and increasing competition among mobile service operators.
As per Pakistan telecommunication authority [6] total cellular teledensity has reached to 70.4%, which predicts huge opportunity for M-commerce market in Pakistan. Although, telecommunication infrastructures and mobile services in Pakistan has seen high penetration since telecom deregulation policy introduced by Ministry of IT and Telecommunication since 2000, however, so for, adoption of services like M-commerce has been lethargic [7]. Understanding the importance of trust factor in the adoption of technologies like M-Commerce is of significant concern for the organization offering online services in developing economies same as Pakistan before making huge investment in the sector. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to fill the gap in literature and thereby

Trust in M-Commerce Perspective
Being an important element in commerce or business deals, integrity, ability, and benevolence [12]. Integrity relates to service providers promises that, never to deceive customers. Ability relates to service provider's ability and knowledge which is necessarily required to fulfill their tasks. In online commerce context initial trust has received considerable attention due to its significant role.
Reputation, information quality, company size, willingness to customize and website qualities are identified as significant factors to affect the initial trust built up in online environment [13][14][15]. Regarding online business environment [16] also identified trust as a crucial element of online business activities since there is an uncertain and open nature of web-based systems and internet which are the only medium for financial transaction in the global environment.

Research Context: Pakistan
Having GDP of 246.9 billion dollars (as of year 2015 statistics) with the growth rate of 3.7% per annum,

Proposed Research Model
Various methods have been adopted to analyze the important factors which predict the user's intention Previous research provide good evidence of the impact of trust on the behavior intention and PU [22][23][24][25].
In summary, the proposed research model (

Behavioral Intention
Most of the IS and IT system usage theories and literature define "Actual usage" as a key construct in their framework. However, new research focused on TAM,

FIG. 1. RESEARCH MODEL
often use BI (Behavior Intention) to measure the individual's acceptance and adoption of IT and IS [22].
According to Davis [26] BI is an extent to which an individual intends to perform a specific behavior. Thus, as per TAM the impact of usefulness and ease of use is fully mediated towards the behavioral intention. In M-Commerce context it is the user's likelihood to engage in online transaction using their handheld mobile devices.

Perceived Usefulness
PU is an individual's belief that using a particular technology or systems can enhance his or her performance [26]. Furthermore it is a degree to which individual believe that the use of M-Commerce can improve his daily activities [3]. PU is found to have an positive effect on the adoption of mobile data services [27,28]. Many researchers identified that PU is a major factor that influences the adoption of ICT oriented services [8,26,[29][30][31][32]. PU plays a pivotal role in usage of web portals and acceptance of mobile commerce services [33]. Consistent with the prior studies, it is hypothesized that:

H1:
PU will have a positive significant effect on behavioral intention to accept M-Commerce.

Trust
While conducting online purchase or transaction activity customers feel anxious about sharing their personal information to third party which in this case is virtual [31]. There are both empirical and theoretical evidences regarding a considerable relationship between trust and BI. [34], in their research study, found evidences that behavioral intention is influenced by trust [23], empirically proved significant effect of trust on purchase intention and that, trust increases the individual's intention to use the M-commerce. Some other researchers also found significant relationship between trust and PU [5]. Similarly, [31] provided evidence that trust has positive impact on PU and allows customers to become more vulnerable to the expectation that they would receive the predictable services or goods from the trusty vendors. Thus, on the basis of prior research, it is hypothesized as follows: H2(a): Trust will have a positive significant effect on behavioral intention to accept M-Commerce.

H2(b):
Trust will have a positive significant effect on perceived usefulness to accept M-Commerce.

Perceived Ease of Use
PEOU can be defined as an extent and individual's selfconfidence which he or she claims is free of effort [26].
PEOU reflects the extent of perceived efforts in using M-Commerce [35]. Research studies related to TAM suggest that PEOU has direct or indirect effect on behavioral intention [36]. Literature review shows that PEOU is an important determinant for the acceptance and adoption of IT Systems, like 3G [37], online banking [22,38] Mobile services [39], M-Payments [28] and M-Commerce [40,41].
Thus, we hypothesize that:

H3a
PEOU will have a positive significant effect on behavioral intention to accept M-Commerce.

H3b
PEOU will have a positive significant effect on Perceived usefulness to accept M-Commerce.

Questionnaire Development
In order to assess the impact of trust of Pakistani customers in using M-commerce a structured survey instrument was developed for data collection. Good questionnaire design principles were employed in questionnaire development process, such as avoidance of leading questions and use of positive questions as recommended by [22]. Although, items for each construct were adopted from previous research studies done in context of IS/IT; experts/practitioners were involved to improve the wording and technical expressions to make questionnaires easily understandable to common Mcommerce users. For all four constructs used in proposed framework a total of 24 items were finalized (see Appendix A). For BI all five items were adapted from [26], seven items for PU were adapted from [26,42], seven items for PEOU were also adapted from [26,42]. However six items related to trust were adapted from [5,43]. Seven-pointLikert scale from (1) strongly disagree to (7) strongly agree was used to measure all items related to all four constructs of proposed model. While demographic related information was measured on a nominal scale. As per recommendation of various IS/IT related researcher [22,26,42,44] seven-point rating scale helps to better understand individual's agreement level for a given statement. Regarding sample size, [45] gave rating to different sample sizes and believed that a sample size of 50 is very90poor, 100 is poor, 200 is fair, 300 is good, 500 is very good, and 1,000 is an excellent. Moreover, [46] also claimed that to achieve optimal results a sample size of at least 200 and not exceeding 400 would be a better approach.

Descriptive Statistics
In field survey, approximately 600 questionnaires were

TABLE 2. VARIABLES, FACTOR LOADING, RELIABILITY AND VALIDITY VALUES
The MM indicates fairly reasonable results (Table 3 for model fit indices), i.e. absolute fit measures such as  Table 4 provide additional support of discriminant validity [46,50].

Structural Model
SM with AMOS helps to confirm the hypothesized relationships among the constructs. According to [49] SM helps to evaluate that which constructs directly or indirectly affects the values of other constructs in the proposed model.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The authors thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their many helpful suggestions.