In addition to lack of physical infrastructure, there are other unrelated barriers to the growth of e-commerce. These result from the unwillingness of customers to engage in online transactions even if the infrastructure is in place. In this paper we discuss a number of these issues, including particularly lack of trust, and propose a model that links the components of the customer-vendor relationship logically. The model provides a structure to analyze and potentially mitigate the causes of the gap between customer expectations from online commerce and their perceptions of what the vendor offers.