Online Shopper Reviews: Ramifications for Promotion and Website Utility

Today's consumers are empowered with online shopper reviews which are mostly written and posted by buyers, customers, users, or visitors at a website. Shopper reviews will become more popular and ubiquitous in e-tailing in the near future. However, the marketing literature is still limited when it comes to knowledge of how shoppers perceive and use online reviews in their purchase decisions. Hence, this study explored shoppers’ predispositions toward positive or negative reviews and examined the impact of consumers’ attitudes and usage patterns on their perceived helpfulness and credibility of online shopper/peer reviews. One interesting finding from our study of 342 online shoppers was that consumers who would pay greater attention to positive reviews gave reviews more credible and usefulness ratings than their counterparts who would focus on the negative reviews.