The Effects Of Sellers’ Responses To Negative Online Reviews On Consumers’ Purchase Intention

In recent years, the growth rate of Internet users slows down gradually, but online shopping is still showing rapid growth. Internet users’ perceived risk often exists in the online shopping process, so there is the need to seek help, and online review is a tool often used in doing online shopping decisions. Negative online review is an important form of online review, and its impact is more significant than the positive one, so it also has attracted widespread attention in academia. But there is little research on sellers’ responses to negative reviews, the present researches only study the effect of its existence on consumers, and lack of deep study on internal impact mechanism, leading to the blank of negative online review management theory for shopping site and web store sellers.The key points studied in this paper are as follows:1, when the web sellers response to negative reviews, they atrribute the responsibility of service failures, whether different attribution results will impact potential consumers’ purchase intention;2, if the impact is exsited, whether consumer perceived responsibility will mediate this process;3, whether consumer perceived rationality will regulate consumers’ judgement about sellers’ responsibility; if so, how should sellers attribute when consumer perceived rationality is different. This study combines attribution theory, service remediation theory and related studies about individual information perception under the network environment, to analyze the internal mechanism of the impact of sellers’ responses to negative online reviews from the perspective of sellers’ attribution and consumers’ perception, pointing out that impact of sellers’ different attribution on consumers’ decisions is primarily through consumer perceived sellers’ responsibility, and is also moderated by consumer perceived rationality.Combined with attribution theory, this study divides the types of sellers’ attribution by three dimensions, namely internal attribution, external attribution and situational attribution, and uses the experimental method to take3(sellers’attribution type) x2(consumer perceived rationality) as between-group design. In the study, the experimental samples are the main groups of online shopping--college students.Through the analysis of experimental data, we can draw the following conclusions:Firstly, compared to the case that sellers response but do not attribute, sellers’attribution can help reduce consumer perceived responsibility and improve purchase intention; the perceived responsibility due to situational attribution is less than it due to internal and external attribution. Secondly, the relationship between the sellers’attribution type and consumer purchase intention is connected by consumer perceived sellers’responsibility as mediator, which plays a role of partially mediator between internal attribution and purchase intention, and plays a fully mediator both between the other two attributions and purchase intention. Thirdly, consumer perceived rationality is a moderator variable in the influence of sellers’attribution type on consumer perceived responsibility, and for high consumer perceived rationality, sellers’attribution type will cause greater consumer perceived responsibility differences. Fourthly, sellers’internal attribution and consumer perceived rationality have significant interaction on consumer purchase intention, when consumers perceive a higher rationality, sellers’internal attribution can significantly improve the consumers’willingness to buy.