Research On The Impact Of Online Reviews On The E-commerce Sales Of Agricultural Products

As a large agricultural country,China attaches great importance to rural revitalization in the new stage of development.As an important way to boost rural revitalization,e-commerce can effectively expand the sales channels of agricultural products and increase farmers’ income.With the continuous promotion of the "digital commerce to promote agriculture" work and the construction of digital villages,China’s agricultural e-commerce continues to develop with good momentum,and its model continues to innovate,driving the further release of domestic consumption potential,not only assisting in the structural reform of the agricultural supply side,but also entering a high-quality development stage.Therefore,studying the online sales of agricultural products has important practical significance.At the same time,with the continuous construction and improvement of the agricultural product e-commerce platform,its online review section has also brought a wealth of agricultural product review information.Due to the lively and perishable nature of agricultural products,and the inability to intuitively experience their quality through direct contact with products during online shopping,consumers will face increased perceived risks when making shopping decisions,and need to search for more information to improve their understanding of the product.It has been widely recognized that online reviews contain rich information that can help consumers improve their judgment on products,reduce perceived risk,and ultimately make purchase decisions.Based on theory and literature review,combined with an investigation of the construction of various agricultural product e-commerce platforms and the development status of their online review segments,this article ultimately selected the JD platform as the data acquisition platform for this article,and selected strawberry products with high concentration of origin and variety as the research object to control the impact of individual differences in agricultural products on the research;Using the reciprocal of product sales ranking as a proxy variable for sales,a total of 20574 online reviews of 561 strawberry products were collected using the Octopus crawler tool as a research sample to study the impact of the number of online reviews,positive feedback,number of comments,number of images,and number of follow-up reviews on agricultural product e-commerce sales;On this basis,considering that consumers sometimes exhibit significant scoring differences for the same product,this paper describes this scoring difference using consumer preference heterogeneity,and uses it as an adjusting variable to study the moderating effect of this variable in the process of influencing the sales of agricultural products by the number of reviews,the number of images,and favorable reviews.The empirical results show that under the control of price,store rating,and membership status,the number of online reviews and images has a significant positive impact on agricultural product e-commerce sales.The more reviews and images,the higher the sales of strawberry products;Positive feedback and consumer preference heterogeneity have a significant negative impact on agricultural product e-commerce sales.The former is caused by the online review display mechanism of the JD platform itself,while the latter means that the greater the heterogeneity of consumer preference,that is,the greater the difference in product review scores,the lower the sales of strawberry products;However,the number of comments and the number of follow-up comments have no significant impact on agricultural e-commerce sales.At the same time,the heterogeneity of consumer preferences can significantly negatively regulate the impact of the number of reviews,the number of images,and favorable reviews on agricultural product sales.In summary,this study conducted a study on the impact of online reviews on agricultural product e-commerce sales,taking strawberries as an example,and explored the regulatory role of consumer preference heterogeneity.Overall,this article not only enriches the selection of agricultural products in relevant research,expands and improves the current research results on the impact of online reviews on sales,but also deepens the understanding of the mechanism of consumer preference heterogeneity.This study has important practical significance for e-commerce platforms to optimize the online review mechanism,help merchants improve performance through refined management,and consumers quickly and effectively obtain useful information.It also has important reference value for promoting the construction of the online agricultural product market transaction security system,and consolidating the healthy and sustainable development of the online market.