Substance, Emotional and Non-Emotional Content of Online Review Influence on Purchase Decisions in Indonesian E-Commerce

Abstract

E-commerce is an online-based platform that facilitates interaction between store sellers and product buyers, where each seller can provide various types of products to be marketed. In every shopping transaction in e-commerce, there is a feature, namely online reviews that e-commerce users use to view the product reviews that have been purchased by previous customers. Online reviews in e-commerce are viewed as an important source of information that allows online shoppers to assess the quality of a product before shopping. Therefore, the aim of this study was to determine how the substance, emotional, and non-emotional content of online reviews influence a customer's purchase decision in Indonesian e-commerce. This study included quantitative methods with data collected by 681 respondents. The reference e-commerce includes the five most popular e-commerce platforms in Indonesia. The data collected were analyzed using Covariance Based Structural Equation Modeling. This study found that substance, emotional and nonemotional content of online reviews influence purchase decisions. The results of this study indicate that there are highly influential research variables, namely perceived credibility, and providing rewards to the users who have written online reviews could significantly influence purchase decisions. This study can provide guidance to e-commerce companies to pay more attention to the quality of online reviews that they have because it can influence customer purchase decisions.