How Online Product Reviews Influence Electronic Product Sales:the Moderating Effect Of Product Attributes

Online reviews, a source of electronic word of mouth, not only contain product information but also have normative influence on review readers especially through pressure from majority of aggregated customers or opinion leaders. In this paper, the authors investigated and discussed how online product review text attributes and product attributes jointly affect consumers’ behavior and electronic product sales. More than 170 thousand pieces of reviews for 379 electronic products are crawled to verify the interaction between review text and product type by using LIWC and establishing regression model. We found that, first, higher percentage of search attributes positively moderates the relationship between review sentiment and product sales, but does not help to promote the relationship between review diagnosticity and electronic product sales. Second, if the product price is relatively low, the relationship between review sentiment and product sales will be enhanced while that of review diagnosticity and electronic product sales will be weakened.