Research On The Influence Of Online Review Features On Product Sales

Confronting with the new social media situation with user-generated content as the core,online word-of-mouth communication has become the main source of information for consumers' purchase decisions.According to the existing research results,online reviews have a greater impact on consumer decision-making than other ways of word-of-mouth communication.In the era of Web 2.0,confronting with the new situation of information acquisition,although it is easier for consumers to get online reviews of products,the mass and inconsistency of reviews also bring new troubles to consumers.At the same time,different types of products often have different intrinsic characteristics,which further increases the complexity of reviews.Confronting with the complex large sample online reviews,we should dig deeply into its inherent law.It is of great research value for consumers to effectively identify key product information,optimize the comment mechanism for e-commerce platform and for retailers to improve their business performance.From the existing research progress,many studies take Taobao and Jingdong as research samples.However,compared with Amazon,Taobao and Jingdong's “Default Good Reviews” mechanism and the “Return Goods” mechanism distort the real online review situation,which increasing the uncertainty of the research.On the other hand,due to the lack of specific data on product sales,some studies use the volume of reviews as the proxy variable of product sales.In fact,both domestic and foreign e-commerce websites often have the phenomenon of “sellers manipulating comments”,which makes the volume of reviews can not truly reflect the product sales,and thus raises doubts about “the volume of reviews as an agent variable of product sales”.Based on this,this paper chooses the search products(digital cameras)and experience products(cosmetics)of Amazon China website as the research objects,taking product sales ranking as the proxy variable of sales,and uses python crawler tool to crawl 40207 online reviews of the top 100 products as the research samples,to compare and explore the influence of online review text's features,the volume of reviews' features and review validity's features on product sales of different product types.On this basis,considering the inconsistency of consumers' reviews on the same product,and few studies use consumer heterogeneity as a moderator variable to explore the interaction between this variable and online review features on product sales.Therefore,this paper takes consumer heterogeneity as a moderator variable to research.The main conclusions are as follows:(1)The review depth has a positive correlation with the sales of search products,but has a negative impact on the sales of experience products.Consumer heterogeneity has a negative moderating effect on the relationship between review depth and product sales.That is,when the consumer heterogeneity is higher and the difference of review is greater,potential consumers are risk averse,which reduces their desire to buy.This conclusion shows that when the consumer heterogeneity is higher,it weakens the impact of review depth on product sales;on the contrary,it enhances the impact of review depth on product sales.(2)The more reviews there are,the experience products sales is higher and search products sales is lower.The results also show that the volume of reviews can not represent product sales in some cases.This finding further confirms the query that “the volume of reviews is the proxy variable of product sales”.Consumer heterogeneity moderates the relationship between the volume of reviews and product sales.When the consumer heterogeneity is higher,it weakens the impact of reviews volume on product sales;on the contrary,it enhances the relationship between review volume and product sales.(3)Consumer heterogeneity has a negative moderating effect on the relationship between review depth and product sales.What needs further explanation is that the hypothesis of the correlation between the average score of reviews and product sales is not supported.For the reasons,this paper is similar to other research results: such as Taobao,Jingdong,Amazon and other websites have the phenomenon of “sellers manipulating reviews”,which leads to a larger average score of reviews,that is,the product score masks the inconsistency of consumer product reviews;Even online reviews show that their average score is good,while the content of reviews is bad,which makes the average score can not truly reflect the overall performance of consumer word-of-mouth.Of course,this result also provides evidence for e-commerce platform to further optimize the comment mechanism,but also points out the direction for establishing a more scientific and effective online review system.In conclusion,based on the influencing factors of product sales of different product types,this paper takes consumer heterogeneity as a moderating variable,explores its moderating effect on the relationship between online review features and product sales.Overall,this study further enriches and develops the theoretical and empirical research results of online word-of-mouth,which has practical value for retailers to improve their quality of integrated services and improve business performance,and has important significance for e-commerce platform to optimize the comment mechanism and improve sustainable competitiveness.