The Impact Of Online Reviews And Information Overload On Consumers’ Purchasing Intentions

The time-space limit was broken by the rapid development during the transmission for information.One of the most modern consumption is online shopping.Because of the diversifying products,consumers might face information ocean.So identifying,screening and understanding the information has become the most important link to select the products that meet their needs.For online merchants,in addition to the product information provided by the merchants themselves,the comments of purchased consumers on the products will have an important impact on the products on the platform.An urgent need was emerged to solve the overload situationThat is,how to make the most rational and reasonable choice through limited information screening mechanism and information processing capacity has become a key issue.For online businesses,how to present product information through word-of-mouth,how to distinguish the information needs of consumers,whether different types of consumers need the same type of information,and how to meet the information needs of consumers are the key issues for online businesses to achieve successful marketing.However,in the current online purchase research,a systematic and well-developed system has not yet been formed.Research on reducing the effect of information overload,what we can’t forget,on the online purchase willingness still suffers from imperfect research frameworks and a lack of empirical tests.Therefore,based on summarizing information overload and other related theoretical literature,this study combs the variables such as information overload and consumers’ online shopping intention.We explored the relationship between information overload and consumers’ online shopping intention.We divided online reviews into objective attribute type and subjective experience type.We explored the effect from online reviews,from the perspective of product types and consumer traits,on consumers’ online purchase intention,A theoretical model is constructed to match online reviews with product types and online reviews with consumer traits,introducing information overload as a mediating variable,and consumers’ online shopping intention as the dependent variable,and proposing related research hypotheses.In this study,there are four situational experiments which were conducted to verify five hypotheses.Firstly,the matching effect of online reviews and product type have influence on information overload.That is,for practical products,online reviews based on objective attributes can reduce information overload more than those based on subjective experience.For hedonistic products,compared with objective online reviews,subjective and experiential online reviews can better reduce information overload.Secondly,the matching effect of online reviews and consumers’ characteristics have influence on information overload.That is,for expert consumers,compared with subjective experience online reviews,objective online reviews can better reduce information overload;For non-expert consumers,subjective and experience-based online reviews can reduce information overload more than objective online reviews.Thirdly,information overload reduces consumers’ online purchase intention.In addition,information overload plays a mediating role in the two matching effects,which is online reviews and product type,consumers’ characteristics,on consumers’ online purchase intention.