Research On The Influence Of Contradictory Online Reviews On Consumer Purchase Intention

With the popularity of the Internet and the rapid development of the logistics industry, online shopping has become a popular way of shopping and favored by the vast number of consumers. Compared with the traditional shopping way, online shopping is convenient and quick, time saving and labor saving. It can bring about the unavailable expected return which entity stores cannot match for consumers. But consumers can not observe the real goods, and only do pre-purchase assessment by reading the information provided by businesses, so the uncertainty and risk of shopping increase significantly. In order to reduce the risk of online shopping, more and more consumers put online reviews as an important reference. Compared with seller’s text and picture description, customers more trust other consumers’reviews so they will know more product information through reading online reviews, and thus they can get help for their purchase decision. Online reviews are consumers’real descriptions of their shopping experience, so they are both positive and negative because of different subjective factors. May be it because consumers have different goods experience, perhaps it is because of the different attitude of the customer-service personnel. However, in the current study of online reviews, most scholars take single positive reviews or single negative comments as the research object, and the study on the interaction of the two is not too much. Based on the relevant literature research, and combined with the actual phenomenon, this paper choice contradictory online reviews that dominated by positive comments as the research object, and put consumer attitude as an intermediate variable. In this paper we discuss the impact of online reviews on consumer purchase intention, as well as the mediating effect of consumer attitudes as a mediator.By choosing customer WOM of a clothing product in Taobao.com, according to the two dimensions of variables and, we designed four groups of experiments (Low level of contradiction and centralized layout, low level of contradiction and discrete layout, high level of contradiction and centralized layout, high level of contradiction and discrete layout), the adjustment variables were controlled by the method of group internal item measurement, and the questionnaires were made and the recovery was issued. Then we use SPSS21.0 to carry on the data. Through analysis, it is found that conflict intensity of the contradictory online reviews have significantly negative effect on consumer attitude, and the layout of the contradictions online reviews also affects consumer attitude:the more discrete negative comments, the better the consumer attitude. The interaction effect between the level of contradiction and the layout mode is not significant. Finally, consumer attitude has a positive effect on purchase intention. In this study, we select involvement degree and self-construal as the moderating variable, the results of empirical study:involvement degree have negative modulating effect on the relationship between contradictory online reviews and consumer attitudes; self-construal adjust the relationship between contradictory online reviews and consumer attitudes:for the consumers of interdependent self-construction, their attitude is easily affected by, contradictory online reviews than the consumers of independent self-construal.According to the research conclusions, from the marketing side, we put forward relevant suggestions for the network retailers, from the aspects of how to manage online reviews, improve consumer’s willingness to buy and so on.