Too obvious to ignore: Influence of popular reviews on consumer online purchasing decisions

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Online reviews, as an important way for consumers to understand product information, have an important impact on consumers’ online shopping decisions. A lot of useful explorations have been made on the role of online reviews in existing empirical research, but the interaction between online reviews and its subdivided dimensions have not been explored. OBJECTIVE: Based on the two-step flow theory, this article aims to explore the impact of online review valence, review volume, and their interactions on online sales, focusing on the question of what are the factors that influence customer purchase decisions and what is the moderating effect of popular reviews on review valence. METHODS: Empirical analysis was done by tracking the product information and online sales data of mobile phone products and laptops in search goods category on the Amazon.cn website. RESULTS/CONCLUSION: The research results found that: (1) in terms of review valence, the average score significantly promotes online sales, and negative word-of-mouth significantly decreases online sales; (2) as for review volume, the number of total reviews and popular reviews have significantly promote online sales; (3) regarding the interactions between the review valence and review volume, popular reviews significantly enhance the impact of review valence on online sales, playing a complementary effect for review valence.