Abstract
Online reviews have profound impacts on firm success in terms of sales volume and how much customers are willing to pay, yet firms remain highly dependent on customers’ voluntary contributions. A popular way to increase the number of online reviews is to use product testing programs, which offer participants free products in exchange for writing reviews. Firms that employ this practice generally hope to increase review quality and secure higher product rating scores. However, a qualitative study, experimental study, and multilevel analysis of a field study dataset of more than 200,000 online reviews by product testers combine to reveal that product testing programs do not necessarily generate higher quality reviews, nor better product ratings. Only in certain circumstances (e.g., higher priced products) does offering a product testing program generate these benefits for the firm. Therefore, companies should consider carefully if and when they want to offer product testing programs.
Highlights
Online reviews have profound impacts on firm success in terms of sales volume and how much customers are willing to pay, yet firms remain highly dependent on customers’ voluntary contributions
The importance of online reviews is generally well-known, companies often suffer the challenges of few reviews, low product ratings, and poor quality reviews— especially for new products just introduced to the market (Cui et al 2012)
In Study 1, we explore the different feelings, perceptions, and behaviors evoked by product testing programs with a content analysis of responses to open-ended questions, gathered in surveys of 100 product testers from various testing programs and 12 in-depth interviews with actual Amazon Vine product testers
Summary
Online reviews have profound impacts on firm success in terms of sales volume and how much customers are willing to pay, yet firms remain highly dependent on customers’ voluntary contributions. A popular way to increase the number of online reviews is to use product testing programs, which offer participants free products in exchange for writing reviews. Firms that employ this practice generally hope to increase review quality and secure higher product rating scores. Other firms offer financial incentives to increase customers’ motivation to provide online product reviews. These incentives have been found to have mixed effects on the rating, leading Garnefeld et al (2020) to advise companies to only carefully apply incentives for online reviews
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