Due to the fast-paced emergence of online e-commerce platforms, the landscape of the virtual marketplace has been completely revolutionized by facilitating efficient communication between the buyers and sellers. However, the current systems suffer from a number of trust-related issues such as fake reviews, bias in product ratings, lack of seller responsibility, and lack of means to assess buyer behavior. Rating systems employed in the literature are mainly concerned about the ratings provided by the customers, which leads to an incomplete and often times inaccurate assessment of transaction-based trust. In this research, a Multi-Dimensional Trust Based Rating System (MDTRS) is proposed, where product rating, seller reputation, and buyer credibility are taken into account together in order to form a complete rating mechanism. The proposed rating mechanism differentiates itself from other rating algorithms since it evaluates all the parties involved in the transaction system and hence ensures complete responsibility. In the proposed system, a trust score calculator is developed using dynamic weights according to the credibility of the input and interaction history between the user and the service provider. The implementation of the system is performed through a scalable full-stack architecture along with buyer, seller, and administrator interfaces.
Patel et al. (Thu,) studied this question.