Consumers’ lack of trust is identified as one of the greatest barriers inhibiting business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce. This may be partly attributable to the lack of face-to-face interpersonal exchanges that support trust behavior in conventional commerce. It was proposed that initial trust may be built by simulating face-to-face interaction. To investigate this, an extensive laboratory-based experiment was conducted to assess the initial trust in consumers using four online vendors’ websites with a variety of still and video images of sales personnel, both Western and Saudi Arabian. Initial trust was found to be enhanced for websites employing photographs and video clips compared to control websites lacking such images; also the effect of culture was stronger in the Saudi Arabian setting when using Saudi photos rather than Western photos.

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Business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce suffers from consumers' lack of trust. This may be partly attributable to the lack of face-to-face interpersonal exchanges that provide trust behavior in conventional commerce. It was proposed that initial trust may be built by simulating face-to-face interaction. To test this, an extensive laboratory-based experiment was conducted to assess the initial trust in consumers using four online vendors' Web sites with a variety of still and video images of sales personnel, both Western and Saudi Arabian. Initial trust was found to be enhanced for Web sites employing photographs and video clips compared to control Web sites lacking such images; also the effect of culture was stronger in the Saudi Arabian setting when using Saudi photos rather than Western photos.

E-commerce B2C yet suffers from consumers' lack of trust, and most of the research in e-commerce field focuses on how to build trust through cues that appeal to pursue consumers to do on-line purchasing. Since the nature of the Internet is lack of interpersonal exchanges that enhance trust behaviour, in this study we compared on-line consumers' initial trust on four on-line vendors with the interpersonal cues of a person representing customer supports (Western photo, Saudi photo, Western video clip) and without photo through an extensive lab experiment. We found that the photograph and the video clip enhanced the initial trust than no photo and that the effect of the culture was stronger with Saudi than Western photo. Nevertheless, we presented many results that benefit the academic and the practitioner respectively.

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