When do consumers buy online product reviews? Effects of review quality, product type, and reviewer’s photo

Highlights

• Quality of online product reviews has significant influence on purchase intention.

• For search good, review quality has positive indirect effect via product evaluation.

• For experience good, review quality has both direct (−) and indirect (+) effects.

• Review quality affects website evaluation only when reviewers’ photos are present.

Abstract

A web-based experiment (N = 201) examined (a) how the quality of online product reviews affects the participants’ acceptance of the reviews as well as their evaluations of the sources and (b) how such effects vary depending on the product type and the availability of reviewers’ photos. For the product type, an experience good (computer game) whose quality is difficult to assess before firsthand experience and a search good (vitamin) whose quality can be easily evaluated by reading a product description were compared. After reading overall positive reviews, those exposed to the high-quality (vs. low-quality) reviews evaluated the product more positively, which in turn, led to a stronger purchase intention. However, review quality also had a negative direct effect on the purchase intention for the experience good, with no corresponding effect for the search good. High-quality reviews induced more positive evaluations of the reviewers (primary source), but they enhanced website evaluation (secondary source) only when the reviewers’ photos were present, suggesting that such visual cues may facilitate systematic message processing.

Introduction

People buy things online. The US retail e-commerce spending reached 186.2 billion dollars in 2012, a remarkable 15% increase from the previous year (comScore, 2013). Likewise, the total value of online shopping in South Korea amounted to 26.7 billion dollars in 2011, nearly a threefold increase from 2005 (Statistics Korea, 2012). Among many unique features of online shopping, consumer product reviews, also referred to as electronic word of mouth (eWOM), have drawn much attention from both academics and the public as one of the most influential sources people rely on when making a purchase decision (Hu et al., 2006, Huang et al., 2009). For example, even the sheer number of reviews was found to affect the consumers’ willingness to buy the target product (Chevalier and Mayzlin, 2006, Duan et al., 2008), suggesting that people may take the quantity of reviews as an indicator of the product’s popularity or its value.

However, not all reviews are created equal. Research has shown that high-quality reviews, often operationalized as the ones including relevant, comprehensive, and accurate product-related information (Cheung & Thadani, 2012), exert greater influence on product evaluation (e.g., Lee, Park, & Han, 2008), purchase intention (e.g., Park, Lee, & Han, 2007), and evaluation of the website (e.g., Awad & Ragowsky, 2008), compared to low-quality reviews that simply reiterate the reviewers’ subjective feelings and opinions. Moreover, such effects were more or less likely to occur depending on several receiver-related factors, such as involvement (e.g., Lee et al., 2008) and prior knowledge (e.g., Park & Kim, 2008). For example, the quality of eWOM exerted greater influence when the consumers’ involvement was higher (Lee et al., 2008) and perceived informativeness of eWOM was more influential than perceived product popularity for more involved individuals (Park & Lee, 2008).

Previous studies, however, have not specified or empirically tested the process through which review quality alters the purchase intention. Based on the theory of reasoned action, which holds that behavioral intention is determined by an individual’s personal attitude and perceived norms concerning the target behavior (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975), the current study proposed a conceptual model in which product evaluation serves as a mediator between product quality and purchase intention. In addition, considering that (a) people tend to evaluate a speaker based on the speaker’s message quality (Slater & Rouner, 1996), and (b) a website featuring reviews can also be considered as another source of messages (Sundar & Nass, 2001), we also investigated if review quality affects the evaluations of the reviewers and the e-commerce website itself.

In attempts to refine the conceptual model further, the present study incorporated if and how two context-related factors, product type and reviewer’s photo, moderate the effects of review quality. With respect to the product type, we compared a search good and an experience good (Nelson, 1970, Nelson, 1974). Search goods are the products whose quality is easily assessed based on product information even before firsthand experience, whereas experience goods are the ones whose quality is difficult to evaluate before direct experience. Unlike previous studies examining for which product type eWOM is more or less persuasive (Park and Lee, 2009, Wei and Lu, 2013), the current study focused on if people process and respond to eWOM of varying quality differently, depending on the product type. In a similar vein, we also investigated if the availability of the reviewers’ photos alters the extent to which people systematically process the product reviews and respond differently to high- and low-quality reviews. .

In the following section, we first propose a mediation model to explain how review quality affects the readers’ purchase intention. Then, the effects of review quality on source evaluations are discussed, distinguishing the primary and the secondary sources. Lastly, product type and reviewer’s photo are introduced as two potential moderators of the review quality effects, with an emphasis on their respective influence on message processing.