The Impact Of Product Online Review Attributes On Consumers' Willingness To Purchase

The advent of the Web 2.0 and "Internet +" era is prompting more and more consumers to choose online shopping instead of buying goods in stores.When customers make online purchases,they usually face a lot of unknown online shopping risks due to the lack of information and the uncertainty of product quality.Therefore,most online consumers will take other people's relevant information(about product quality and post-purchase experience)which is a specific manifestation of product online reviews that come from customer reviews and third-party reviews,as their own consumption behavior reference.Existing studies have proven that the above two review sources can have an impact on the purchase decisions of online consumers which may be promotion or inhibition due to different review attributes.There are also scholars who studied the bias(extremely good or extremely bad)of online reviews given by consumers based on factors such as the degree of product preferences and merchant satisfaction after purchasing products online.But these studies are mainly focused on reviewers,few scholars considered that online customers had different degrees of preference and product expectations for the price,function,appearance and other information of product before referring to online reviews,that is,consumer's self-selection bias.The effect of online product reviews on customer purchase preferences may be strengthened or weakened when customers refer to the product reviews due to self-selection bias.Based on the existing researches,this paper explores the effect of online review attributes from different sources on consumers' willingness to buy by constructing a Structural Equation Model.At the same time,based on the classification and definition of selection bias by foreign scholars,two theories of involvement andconsumer expectations were introduced to construct a theory model of selection bias,and the type of "high involvement + positive expectations" is defined as positive bias,the type of "low involvement + negative expectation" is defined as negative bias.Take the consumer's self-selection bias as a moderator in the research model to explore the effect of self-selection bias on relationship between online product reviews and customer purchasing preferences.For the main hypotheses to be studied in the research,this paper mainly adopts the Situational experiment method to verify the hypotheses through the form of "situational experiment + questionnaire".The design of the questionnaire is mainly divided into two parts.The first part is a pre-test questionnaire which is the best investigation of experimental products on the formal questionnaire from the basic factors such as product appearance,price,and configuration that can cause consumers to produce product preferences,expectations,and satisfaction.Through the summary of the experimental products in the existing research,the pre-test questionnaire of this study selected three products: mobile phone,laptop,and camera.Each product corresponds to a scene and a stimulating material.The experiment finally selected the laptop as the experimental product of formal questionnaire.The second part is a formal questionnaire,which investigates the impact of consumer online product review sources,review attributes,and selection bias on customer purchase decision behavior.In this part,the author designed two experimental scenarios,each of which corresponds to different stimulus materials.For the formal questionnaires collected,this research will perform descriptive statistical analysis,reliability and validity tests,exploratory factor analysis,and use Structural Equation Models to test research hypotheses with SPSS,AMOS,Mplus and other analytical tools.The results show that:(1)the emotional tendency of customer reviews,the depth of product reviews in online shopping,the authority of third-party product review platforms,and the professionalism of commentators have a significant positive effect on consumers' shopping willingness.(2)Consumers' self-selection bias has a significant positive adjustment to the relationship between the depth of product reviews,the authority of third-party product review platform and the willingness to purchase.There is also a significant adjustment effect on the relationship between the professionalism of the reviewers and the willingness to purchase,but the direction of the adjustment is contrary to the hypothesis test,which is manifested as negative adjustment.(3)The consumer's self-selection bias has no significant effect on the relationship between theemotional tendency of the customer's product reviews and the willingness to purchase.