A Meta-analysis Of Online Reviews And Consumer Purchasing Decisions And Their Relationship

As a major form of word-of-mouth in the e-commerce environment,online review is an important channel for consumers to understand product information and has a profound impact on consumers’ purchasing decisions.Many studies at home and abroad have confirmed the link between online reviews and consumers’ purchase decisions.However,due to the different research framework,measurement questionnaire,sample quantity and type,and statistical methods of each researcher,there are also great differences among the results of independent studies,so it is difficult to evaluate and choose the results of these independent studies.Therefore,the meta-analysis method will be adopted in this study to systematically evaluate and analyze the relevant researches on the relationship between online reviews and consumer purchasing decisions at home and abroad before 2022,and national cultural differences and sample gender ratio will be included in the meta-analysis as moderating variables,so as to have a deeper understanding of the relationship between online reviews and consumer purchasing decisions.The results of the meta-analysis show that online reviews have a positive impact on consumers’ purchasing decisions,among which the consumer trust propensity,the number of online reviews,the titer of online reviews,the quality of online reviews and the credibility of online reviews have a medium-high correlation with consumers’ purchasing decisions,while the timeliness of online reviews has a mild correlation with consumers’ purchasing decisions.Subgroup and meta-regression analysis further found that national cultural differences and sample sex ratio both have moderating effects on the relationship between online reviews and consumer purchase decisions.The meta-analysis emphasizes the impact of online reviews on consumers’ purchase decisions,but the mechanism of the impact of online reviews on consumers’ purchase decisions remains to be further studied.Based on the stimulus-organic-response model(SOR),this study established a mechanism model of the influence of online reviews on consumers’ purchase decisions,and used SPSS26.0 to conduct statistical analysis on 489 questionnaires to explore the mediating role of perceived risk between online reviews and consumers’ purchase decisions.The results show that online reviews have a significant impact on consumers’ purchase decisions,and perceived risk plays a mediating role between online reviews and consumers’ purchase decisions.To sum up,the meta-analysis and relational studies both found that online reviews have a significant impact on consumers’ purchasing decision-making behavior,and perceived risk plays a significant mediating role between online reviews and consumers’ purchasing decisions.