The Evolution of Digital Consumer Trust Formation: A Study Across BRICS+ Nations

This study examines the digital consumer confidence-building process across the BRICS+ countries (2014-24) and addresses the critical gap in understanding how individual consumers develop digital platform confidence in emerging markets. We build on trust theory with an integrated socio-technical model and show that, through a consumer-centric analytical approach, the development of consumer trust in digital ecosystems can be explained by four behavioral stages (i.e., initial perception, experiential validation, relationship building, and ecosystem embeddedness) based on patterns in secondary data from multiple sources. Each stage demonstrates progressively stronger correlation coefficients (β = 0.74), with significant differences in consumer behavior patterns across stages. This research contributes to IS literature by examining how technological infrastructure relates to developing trust (R2=0.824) as well as institutional factors relating to forming trust (R 2 = 0.856). Although our secondary data sources do not allow us to directly measure the psychological processes, these patterns are consistent with previous work on risk perception and mediating roles of trust. In novel-to-consumer studies, we found significant variations in how consumers across different BRICS+ nations interpret identical trust signals, with cross-cultural dimensions accounting for 72.4% of this variance. Our segmentation analysis reveals three types of consumer trust archetypes: tech-confident adapters, cautious validators, and guided adopters, based on their different patterns of decision-making, risk thresholds, and platform interaction behaviors, which further extends the existing technology acceptance models to show the transition from technology acceptance to embedded behavior, and offers implications for digital platform designers and marketers in emerging economies, as well as advancing information systems understanding by mapping how consumers cognitively process technical, social, and institutional signals in the context of an evolving digital platform.