Impact of Online Reviews on Purchasing Decisions

Author(s):  
Dhiraj Jain ◽  
Lovish Bhansali ◽  
K. Sanal Nair

Internet has enabled today's consumer to transform himself from passive to an active and an informed consumer who can share his experiences, opinions about product or services with an infinite number of consumers around the globe. These reviews or opinions are further used by potential buyers of that particular product or service via electronic Word of Mouth (e-WOM). The study on the impact of e-WOM on online sales has gradually emerged but a number of questions still remain unanswered. The aim of this study is to assess the impact of one type of e-WOM i.e., the online consumer reviews, on purchasing decisions of electronic products. This empirical study also focuses on the relationship between reviews and purchasing behaviour. An instrument was prepared to measure the proposed constructs, with questionnaire items taken from prior studies but adapted to fit the context of e-commerce. The survey was applied to academicians in India through internet. The results show that consumer reviews have a causal impact on consumer purchasing behaviour and they have an effect on choosing the products by consumer. Finally, the results and their implications are discussed.

2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (9) ◽  
pp. 2035-2051 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giampaolo Viglia ◽  
Roberta Minazzi ◽  
Dimitrios Buhalis

Purpose Online consumer reviews have become increasingly important for consumer decision-making. One of the most prominent examples is the hotel industry where consumer reviews on websites, such as Bookings.com, TripAdvisor and Venere.com, play a critical role in consumers’ choice of a hotel. There have been a number of recent studies analyzing various aspects of online reviews. The purpose of this paper is to investigate their effects in terms of hotel occupancy rates. Design/methodology/approach This paper measures through regression analysis the impact of three dimensions of consumer reviews (i.e. review score, review variance and review volume) on the occupancy rates of 346 hotels located in Rome, isolating a number of other factors that might also affect demand. Findings Review score is the dimension with the highest impact. The results suggest that after controlling for other variables, a one-point increase in the review score is associated to an increase in the occupancy rate by 7.5 percentage points. Regardless the review score, the number of reviews has a positive effect, but with decreasing returns, implying that the higher the number of reviews, the lower the beneficial effect in terms of occupancy rates is. Practical implications The findings quantify the strong association of online reviews to occupancy rates suggesting the use of appropriate reputational management systems to increase hotel occupancy and therefore performance. Originality/value A major contribution of this paper is its comprehensiveness in analyzing the relation between online consumer reviews and occupancy across a heterogeneous sample of hotels.


2021 ◽  
Vol 72 (06) ◽  
pp. 639-644
Author(s):  
YIBING SHAO ◽  
XIAOFEN JI ◽  
LILIN CAI ◽  
SONIA AKTER

Online reviews have emerged as an essential information source for online clothing purchasing behaviour. It is thus paramount for marketers to understand what makes online clothing review helpful to consumers. This research primarily aims to examine the relationship between review textual content factors and review helpfulness in the context of online clothing purchasing. Experiments on review concreteness (concrete or abstract), review variance (consistent or inconsistent) and review valence (positive or negative), between participants were conducted to explore the interaction effect. The findings suggest that online clothing review concreteness, variance and valence are significant factors affecting review helpfulness. Additionally, this study’s findings show that abstract review, negatively review and inconsistent review has a stronger effect on online clothing review helpfulness than concrete review, positively review and consistent review. The findings will help customers to write better clothing reviews, help retailers to manage their websites intelligently and aid customers in their product purchasing decisions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 638-669
Author(s):  
Miriam Alzate ◽  
Marta Arce-Urriza ◽  
Javier Cebollada

When studying the impact of online reviews on product sales, previous scholars have usually assumed that every review for a product has the same probability of being viewed by consumers. However, decision-making and information processing theories underline that the accessibility of information plays a role in consumer decision-making. We incorporate the notion of review visibility to study the relationship between online reviews and product sales, which is proxied by sales rank information, studying three different cases: (1) when every online review is assumed to have the same probability of being viewed; (2) when we assume that consumers sort online reviews by the most helpful mechanism; and (3) when we assume that consumers sort online reviews by the most recent mechanism. Review non-textual and textual variables are analyzed. The empirical analysis is conducted using a panel of 119 cosmetic products over a period of nine weeks. Using the system generalized method of moments (system GMM) method for dynamic models of panel data, our findings reveal that review variables influence product sales, but the magnitude, and even the direction of the effect, vary amongst visibility cases. Overall, the characteristics of the most helpful reviews have a higher impact on sales.


2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-112
Author(s):  
Nur Zarifah Dhabitah Mahat ◽  
Mohd Hafiz Hanafiah

This paper aims to examine the impact of TripAdvisor reviews on behavioural intentions, basing on travellers' trust towards the e-WOM reviews. Four factors are proposed for building travellers’ trust and behavioural intentions: information quality, credibility, adoption and usefulness. Trust is expected to mediate the relationship between eWOM attributes and travellers’ behavioural intention. Data from 410 travellers were analysed using Partial Least Square-Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM), and the findings show that TripAdvisor e-WOM attributes (information credibility, adoption and usefulness) significantly influence the traveller's trust. Besides, traveller behavioural intention was influenced considerably by TripAdvisor eWOM information credibility and usefulness. Lastly, trust in e-WOM significantly mediates travellers' behavioural intention. This paper confirms the importance of eWOM in the context of the tourism industry and travellers' trust and behaviour towards online review, which altered how consumers behave before deciding to travel.


2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (5) ◽  
pp. 446-464
Author(s):  
Rowanne Fleck ◽  
Benjamin R Cowan ◽  
Eirini Darmanin ◽  
Yixin Wang

Abstract Online consumer reviews are important for people wishing to make purchases online. However, not everyone contributes online reviews. This paper looks at consumer motivations of reviewing and rating behaviour in order to motivate the design of a mobile interface for online reviewing. An interview study found that people tend to contribute reviews and ratings based on their perception of whether they would be helpful or not to others as well as their own personal view of the usefulness of reviews and ratings when buying products. There also seems to be a cost-benefit trade-off that influences people’s decisions to review and rate: people tend to make a decision based on the perceived value of that review or rating to the community against the effort and costs of contributing. A mobile interface was designed that was intended both to reduce the cost of leaving reviews and to increase the perception of the usefulness of the reviews to others. An initial evaluation of this reviewing interface suggests that it could encourage more people to leave reviews.


2020 ◽  
pp. 113-119

This study aims to analyse the impact of the level of synergy in a multi-channel retailer and its end results on customer purchasing behaviour. A deductive approach was adopted by reviewing the past studies on implementation and goals of synergy. It led to a quantitative research model for evaluating the effects of inter-departmental synergy in the market. In order to measure the effect of this strategy on the Georgian customers, a questionnaire was distributed among 412 retail customers. The outcome indicated that the level of synergy positively relates to the frequency and monetary value spent by customers and negatively impacts the threat of pure online retailers as substitutes. The theoretical and managerial implications of the relationship are discussed.


2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaohong Wang ◽  
Shuang Dong

AbstractWith the rapid development of online shopping, how to explore the value of online reviews, so as to give full play to their role in potential users’ purchasing decisions. Based on text mining and quantitative analysis, this paper studies the sentiment analysis of online reviews on B2C shopping website. The main attributes of commodity or service are extracted based on the order of word frequency in the online reviews. Text analysis method is used to judge the relationship between attributes of commodity or service and its emotional words. The fine-grained sentimental polarity and intensity of attributes are identified to analyze users’ concerns and preferences. The research shows that users pay more attention to the configuration and after-sales service of mobile, and have a positive sentimental orientation to most of attributes, especially unlocking function, hand feeling attribute and logistics service; and have a neutral sentimental orientation towards the attributes of battery and memory, and a negative sentimental orientation towards the membrane of mobile phone. The results can provide a reference for consumers to make purchasing decisions, for enterprises to improve product quality, and for shopping platform to optimize service.


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