The Effects Of Online Customer Reviews On Product Sales

The popularity of the Internet promotes the rapid development of Electronic Commerce. It also makes online shopping market increasingly prosperous. In order to eliminate the uncertainty in the decision making process, Consumers would collect information about commodities through various channels, online review is one of the important ways of obtaining information. When facing with so many online reviews, however, consumers will only choose useful comments for reference. Therefore, to explore the usefulness of online reviews has become an important research topic. Recently, some of domestic and foreign scholars studied the effectiveness of online reviews (EOR), but different scholars got different research conclusions. At the same time, there exists no consensus between scholars about the factors of EOR. The author has found that Commodity brand is one of the main factors that influencing the consumer online purchasing behavior, but few scholars research whether the brand influences EOR. Therefore, this paper studies the influence factors of EOR, discusses whether commodity brand influences consumers’ perception, and whether affects the relations between other factors with EOR. This paper has the important realistic and theoretical significance.Based on a literature review, drawing on existing research predecessors, this paper build an research model which integrates brand strength, product maturity related, other factors and the effectiveness of online reviews. And we collect data about sales rankings, online reviews, prices and other data of regular TV and smart TV in Jingdong Mall site on a regular basis. For the empirical data obtained using EVIEWS5.0statistical analysis tools, validation studies the relationship between the framework and assumptions papers. Research has shown brand equity to moderate the relationship between online customer reviews (OCRs) and sales in both the emerging smart TV and mature regular TV categories. By comparison, OCRs have no significant influence on the sales of strong brands, although these models do raising substantially owing to their brand equity. The higher aggregate sales come into being a great deal of positive OCRs, and the increase of positive comments aid a brand’s changeover from weak to strong. This brings a feedback cycle between positive OCRs and sales for weak brands that not only helps increasing sales but also increases whole brand equity. In contrast to the view that brands matter less in the existence of OCRs, we find that OCRs matter less in the existence of strong brands. Positive OCRs function differently than marketing communications in that their effect is greater for weak brands.In the end, we present some advice about business enlightenment and future development on the research on the basis of the finding. We wish this paper can help consumers and online retailers to have a better understanding of EOR, and improve their abilities to use OCRs.