It is very important for every business to take note of a consumer response after every purchase of goods or services. As this will foster the growth of the business.\u00a0 In this article, we delved into the impact of online reviews on consumers purchasing behavior. We started off by explaining what this behavior is.<\/p>\n
Definition <\/strong><\/p>\n Consumer purchasing behavior <\/strong>refers to the decisions and actions people undertake to buy products or services for personal use. In other words, it’s the actions you take before buying a product or service, and as you will see, many factors influence that behavior. The term consumer can refer to individual consumers as well as organizational consumers, and more specifically, “an end user, and not necessarily a purchaser, in the distribution chain of a goods or services.<\/p>\n Understanding purchase and consumption behavior is a key challenge for marketers. Consumer behavior, in its broadest sense, is concerned with understanding both how purchase decisions are made and how products or services are consumed or experienced. Consumers are active decision-makers. They decide what to purchase, often based on their disposable income or budget. They may change their preferences related to their budget and a range of other factors.<\/p>\n Impacts of online reviews on consumer purchasing behavior<\/strong><\/p>\n Online Product Review<\/strong><\/p>\n Several studies have reported on the influence of online reviews, in particular on purchasing decisions in recent times (Zhang et al., 2014; Zhong-Gang et al., 2015; Ruiz-Mafe et al., 2018; Von Halverson et al., 2018; Guo et al., 2020; Kang et al., 2020; Wu et al., 2021). These studies have reported on various aspects of online reviews on consumers\u2019 behavior, including consideration of documentary factors (Ghose and Ipeirotiss, 2010), the effect of the level of detail in a product review, and the level of reviewer agreement with it on the credibility of a review, and consumers\u2019 purchase intentions for search and experience products (Jim\u00e9nez and Mendoza, 2013). For example, by means of text removal, Ghose and Ipeirotiss (2010) concluded that the use of product reviews is influenced by textual features, such as subjectivity, informality, readability, and linguistic accuracy. Likewise, Boardman and Mccormick (2021) found that consumer attention and behavior differ across web pages throughout the shopping journey depending on its content, function, and consumer\u2019s goal. Furthermore, Guo et al. (2020) showed that pleasant online customer reviews lead to a higher purchase likelihood compared to unpleasant ones. They also found that alleged reliability and apparent diagnostic have a significant influence on purchase decisions, but only in the context of unpleasant online customer reviews. These studies suggest that online product reviews will influence consumer behavior but the overall effect will be influenced by many factors.<\/p>\n Emotion Valence of Online Product Review and Purchase Intention<\/strong><\/p>\n Although numerous studies have investigated factors that may influence the effects of online review on consumer behavior, few studies have focused on consumers\u2019 perceptions, emotions, and cognition, such as perceived review helpfulness, ease of understanding, and perceived cognitive effort. This is because these studies are mainly based on traditional self-report-based methods, such as questionnaires, interviews, and so on, which are not well equipped to measure implicit emotion and cognitive factors objectively and accurately (Plassmann et al., 2015). Though, emotional factors are also recognized as important in purchase intention. For example, a study on the usefulness of online film reviews showed that positive emotional tendencies, longer sentences, the degree of a mix of the greater different emotional tendencies, and distinct expressions in critics had a significant positive effect on online comments.<\/p>\n Eye-Tracking, Online Product Review, and Purchase Intention<\/strong><\/p>\n The eye-tracking method is impact of online review on consumer\u00a0 purchasing behavior commonly used in mental mindset research. Many researchers are calling for the use of neurobiological, neurocognitive, and physiological approaches to advance information system research. Several studies have been conducted to explore consumers\u2019 online behavior by using eye-tracking. For example, using the eye-tracking method, Luan et at. (2016) found that when searching for products, customers\u2019 attention to attribute-based estimation is meaningfully longer than that of experience-based evaluation, while there is no significant difference for the experiential products. Moreover, their results indicated eye-tracking indexes, for example, fixation dwell time, could instinctively reflect consumers\u2019 search behavior when they attend to the reviews.<\/p>\n Hypotheses is one of the impact of online review on consumer purchasing behavior<\/strong><\/p>\n From an economic point, Nelson divided goods into search goods and experience goods. Search goods mean the goods that consumers will be able to get correct information before buying according to the information, such as mobile phones, cameras, printers and so on. Experience goods refer to the goods. Currently, the reviews systems of different e-commerce sites aren\u2019t exactly the same. But they are all involved in logistics rating, services rating, description rating and comment reviewed consumer cannot obtain accurate information from product information before the purchase, such as cosmetics, food, and so on. The results of foreign research show that experience good is more dependent on online reviews than search good, and consumer tend to use online reviews while buying experience goods Therefore, this paper studies online reviews of experience goods.<\/p>\n Review Rating<\/strong><\/p>\n Review rating of goods is the initial attitude of consumer, which is assessed by the consumer on goods. The reviews systems of B2C and C2C are slightly different. C2C review system involves positive reviews, moderate reviews and negative reviews, while B2C does not have this option. In this paper, we study how the quantity of these star rating on C2C website (Taobao) affect consumer purchase behavior. Consumers update the attitude of goods according to the star ratings, which is one of the consumers learning process.<\/p>\n Data Collection, Analysis and Results<\/strong><\/p>\n Based on the following reasons, this paper selects cleanser as the research object. First, cleanser is an experience product, consumer buy it for personal use or give others as gifts, avoiding comparisons and other emotional factors to make a purchase. Second, this product is a daily use product. Consumers have different experience with each other, excluding the impact of consumers\u2019 personal feelings about the product effect.<\/p>\n Taobao website offers 30 days of transaction records and reviews records. So, this paper collects 30 days sales on Taobao for the study. We select online data from November 15, 2014 to December 15, 2014 as data sample, including 440 shops\u2019 sales information of Shiseido cleanser on Taobao. The total number of reviews is 218 954. Removing invalid evaluation, data sample involves 434 shops\u2019 information.<\/p>\n The descriptive statistics for all variables are included in Table 1. The minimum value of positive reviews, moderate reviews, negative reviews is 0. Different shops have different sales. Some shops sold this product little and no one gives reviews. So the minimum value is 0. The mean of moderate reviews and negative reviews is less than 3. Because consumers don\u2019t often give moderate review or negative review, so the mean is small. The minimum value of description rating, services rating and logistics rating are 4.5, the maximum is 5, the mean is about 4.8 (out of 5), showing the three rating of 434 shops have little difference. The minimum value of pictures reviews, additional reviews and cumulative reviews are 0. The mean of picture reviews and additional reviews is about 10. It costs consumers more time and effort to post pictures and additional reviews. If the product does not appear any problems, consumers do not give additional reviews and pictures especially.<\/p>\n