| As an experience product,the quality of online paid courses is difficult to control and measure.Before making purchase decisions,consumers have especially relying on online reviews to get electronic word-of-mouth.However,there is a big difference in the adoption of this comment reply function among the major online paid course platforms.Therefore,it is necessary to analyze the relationship between reply’s characteristics and sales,and to explore the impact of the display combination of reviews and replies on the information usefulness and consumers’ purchase intentions.The results of this thesis can help online paid course platforms to decide whether to add the reply function in their comment area,and how to display the reply in the limited page space,so as to improve the consumers’ purchase intention.Based on the inconsistency in the adoption of current course platforms and the lack of related theoretical research,this thesis raises the following three questions:（1）What characteristics of the reply affect its usefulness and the courses’ sales;（2）Whether displaying the reply can help online review get higher the information usefulness perception,and which method is better;（3）The influence mechanism of the combination of reviews and replies on consumers’ purchase intention.The first study has crawled the online paid course reviews of Bilibili.com as the research object.The results of regression and mediation analysis show that the length and number of replies have a positive impact on the usefulness of its information usefulness and directly affect the sales of online paid courses.The rate of being replied positively affects product sales with a significant indirectly effect of reply usefulness.The timeliness of reply has no significant impact on its information usefulness and sales.The second study has designed a comparative experiment to verify the difference of the review information usefulness with different ways of displaying replies.The results show that there is no significant difference in the information usefulness of long reviews with different reply presentation methods.However,for short reviews,their information usefulness is higher when the online review is displayed by long but few replies.And there is no difference for long reviews.The third study has constructed a structural equation model for empirical analysis by questionnaire based on fluency theory.The results showed that there are significant differences in consumers’ perception of the difficulty of information processing for the different combinations of review and reply.The information fluency of short review with long but few replies is higher than short review with short but many replies,while there is no significant difference in the long review group.The higher the perception of information fluency when browsing comments and replies,the higher the usefulness of information,with the positive impact on purchase intention.Information usefulness plays a full mediating role.This thesis introduces the reply’s characteristics into online review research,expands the theoretical research on the influencing factors of online review usefulness,and discusses the differences in review usefulness and information fluency of different combinations of review and reply,as well as the impact on consumers’ purchase intention,which has a certain degree of influence.theoretical significance.The practical value of this thesis is to provide theoretical support for online paid course platforms to adopt the comment reply function,and to provide suggestions for platform managers to choose information display strategies. |
PDF Full Text Request