Little empirical research has addressed how trust building occurs across the early stages of a consumer's web experience. This paper tests the effects of privacy assurance and industry endorsement seals, reputation advertising by a web business, disposition to trust, and structural assurance on consumer trust across two early stages: the introductory stage, in which a consumer has only second-hand information about the site, and the exploratory stage, when the consumer first visits the website.

The study found, first, that disposition to trust and structural assurance had a significant effect on trust in the web business in both the exploratory and introductory stages, showing that their effects did not erode over time. Second, reputation advertising was found to be an effective way to build trust. Third, counter to prevailing opinion and popular practice, neither a noticeable TRUST-e privacy seal nor a noticeable professional association seal had any significant impact on trust in the web business. When added to the other model variables during the exploratory stage, perception of site quality became the primary influence on trust, displacing some of the effects of disposition to trust and reputation advertising. This indicates that trust factors in the introductory stage differ somewhat from trust factors in the exploratory stage. Hence, these two stages require different strategies for building trust.