Consumers' trust and popularity of negative posts in social media: A case study on the integration between B2C and C2C business models

Abstract

Trust can be defined as the vulnerability of trustor towards trustee to meet certain expectations. This paper extends the definition of trust to cover digital world and illustrate the trust model used by most of nowadays online stores. The social media sentiment analysis revealed the sentiments of customers towards traditional Business-to-Consumer (B2C) stores vs modern Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) market places. Sentiment analysis was performed across multiple industry's like Taxi, hospitality, and online retail industry. The popularity of Negative sentiments was higher towards most of modern C2C market places compared to traditional B2C stores. The popularity of negative posts was linked with the consumers' trust towards the C2C market place offering. However, few C2C companies managed to maintain a high positive posts ration and sometimes they were better than traditional B2C business. Uber and AirBnB surprisingly were not on the top.