The Research Of Contradictory Content And Quantity Structure Of Online Reviews Affecting Consumers’ Online Purchase Intention

In recent years, with the development of e-comment in China, onlineshopping has become an increasingly popular way of consumption. It hasprofoundly changed people’s shopping and living habits. Different from thecurrent entity shop, the network shop is a virtual trading platform, onlinetransaction decision requires more information, and online reviews seem to beimportant basis for decision-making when consumers go shopping online. The"2012Chinese Network Shopping Market Research Report" released by ChinaInternet Network Information Center (CNNIC) shows, when consumer is familiarwith the product,34.7%of them will be affected by online reviews; when theyare not familiar with the product,44.8%of them will be affected by onlinereviews. This shows that online reviews play a very important role in consumers’online shopping decision-making.However, because of the difference in individuals, goods and services,online reviews on the internet are often full of contradiction. For the sameproduct, there may be a lot of positive reviews, and a lot of negative reviews.When consumers are faced with these reviews, how will they make the purchasedecision? At the same time, the quantity of online reviews is also an importantbasis of decision making, how will the number of negative reviews and thenumber of total reviews impact on consumers’ purchase intention? In addition,will different types of product details description affect consumers’ behaviorattitude?This study is based on the expansion of these practical problems. This articlefirstly reviewed much related literature, and then we built the relation model ofonline reviews’ contradictory content, quantity structure and consumer purchaseintention based on ambivalent attitude theory and frame effect theory. This paperregards online reviews’ contradictory content (high vs. low) and the quantitystructure of reviews (6/114vs.56/1104vs.551/11004) as the independentvariable, the type of information frame in product details description (positive vs.negative) as variable, the consumer purchase intentions as the dependent variable.With the method of simulated online shopping experiment, we explored the effect of the relationship between several variables.The study found: online reviews’ contradictory content will significantlyaffect the consumer purchase intention. In high conflict situation, the consumer’swillingness to buy is lower than that in low conflict situation. At the same time,the type of information frame in product details description will play a regulatoryrole. In high conflict situation, consumers faced with negative frame havestronger purchase intention than those who are faced with the positive frame, theresult in low conflict situation is opposite; online reviews’ quantity structure willalso affect the consumer purchase intention. In general, when review quantity islarger, the purchase intention will be stronger, but they are not the simple linearcorrelation. With the increasing of negative reviews quantity, it will weaken thepositive effect of total reviews’ quantity; information framework also plays amoderating role in this process.In the end, this paper discusses the experimental results, summarizes thecontribution and insufficiency and prospects the direction of future research.According to the research results, we provide relevant measures and suggestionsfor e-commerce practitioners to manage their online reviews.