Research On The Impact Of Consumer Review Sentiments From Different Sources On High-involvement Product Sales

With the booming development of e-commerce,online shopping has already been a fashion.Due to hardly experience products before purchase,consumers tend to refer to online reviews for purchase decisions.Online reviews contain much important information on consumers' attitudes about products and services,demands and preference,which exist on many retailer websites and third-party review websites.Therefore,whether the effects of consumer reviews from different sources are same? How do review sentiments impact product sales? This paper attempted to further investigate above issues by mining review contents with different granularities.First,make sentiment analysis with coarse granularity.For consumer reviews,we calculate review sentiments at review level and compare the impact of consumer reviews on high-involvement product sales from retailer websites and third-party review websites with some dimensions of ratings,review volumes,overall sentiments,positive/negative review sentiments.Then we utilize econometric models to regress the panel data.The results show that the reviews on third-party review websites have more impact on high-involvement product sales than retailer-hosted reviews do.Moreover,compared with ratings and numbers of reviews,textual reviews have more influence on sales.Positive reviews from different sources have a positive effect on sales,and negative reviews on third-party review websites have a negative effect on sales while and negative reviews on retailer websites have a no effect on sales.Second,make sentiment analysis with fine granularity.After identifying product features and calculating review sentiments at product feature level,we further compare the effects of review sentiments of product features from retailer websites and third-party review websites on high-involvement product sales,where product features are classified into objective features and subjective features.Then we use log-linear regression model to analyze the panel data,finding that compared with objective features,consumer reviews of subjective features have more significant influence on high-involvement product sales.Thus,we again demonstrate that consumer reviews from third-party websites have significant influence on high-involvement product sales at product feature level.Our results have some implications.Consumers can use consumer reviews on third-party websites for reference to make right purchase decisions and cut down purchase costs and risks.Retailers can use and analyze the third-party consumer reviews to forecast highinvolvement product sales and make relevant marketing strategies.Manufacturers should pay attention to some specific product features,and use profitable product features to improve product designs.