Research on Consumers’ Preferences for Using Online Reviews

Abstract

With the rapid development of e-commerce, the online product reviews and ratings play an important role on the purchase decisions of consumers. Most of the previous researches on online product reviews had focused on the empirical results, however, use of intuition usually resulted in poorer decisions and a lack of the scientific results is difficult to obtain the same conclusions. This study designed a new review ranking system which is used to examine how consumers read the online product review. All the online product reviews were collected from consumers through this system. After summarized and analyzed these data, the results demonstrated that most of consumers first searched out and read positive reviews, but spent more time on the negative comments. In addition, compared with positive reviews, consumers felt they need to read negative reviews even more carefully before they fully trusted a business. Thus, the negative reviews influence the purchase decisions of online shoppers since they would pay most attention to the negative reviews. This study can help enterprises to understand the consumers’ perspective on using the online product reviews and give new insight for future research as well as effectively assist in their management on online reviews.