The Impact Of Online Reviews On Consumer Purchase Decision-Making Process

Due to rapid development of internet and wide popularity of terminal devices,E-commerce penetrates people's daily lives gradually.However,the unique characteristic of network-virtuality-aggravated information asymmetry of customer during their purchase.The objective and factual description of product performs an essential role as message source to fill information gap.Thus,online reviews,main form of objective information,have attracted many researchers' interest over past several decades.But,so far most of them have focused on product sales,i.e.consumers'purchase,ignoring the fact that online shopping is a procedure.Consumer could use different decision strategies across different stages and the impact could be inconsistent during consumers purchase process.Based on multi-stages model of online purchase process,this paper investigated impact of online reviews on consumer buying decision process through consumer's cognitive perspective.First,using choice set and consumers' purchase as outcome of information search stage and alternative evaluation stage respectively,we explore different influences of online reviews-valence,volume and variance-on the two above-mentioned stages.Furthermore,considering heterogeneity of online store,this study introduced seller reputation as a moderation factor to information search stage and conducted another regression analysis to further understand the mechanism of online reviews.Final results show that all of the three features of online reviews have significant positive impact on the outcome of consumers purchase,and this effect has already been highlighted in the initial information search stage.Also,seller reputation do moderate this effect.Specifically,the higher the seller's reputation,the weaker the effect of valence on the information search stage,and the stronger the impact of volume on consumers' choice set.To some degree,this research provided a new perspective to study the impact of online reviews and also enriched existing literature about consumers decision-making process by careful research on information search stage.What's more,the result has provided a scientific and effective method for marketing personnel and website operators to formulate marketing strategies in practice.