TAMPA 鈥� Do elaborate and in-depth reviews help persuade online consumers to buy a product?
Conventional wisdom says yes. More details 鈥� positive or negative 鈥� give potential buyers more to deliberate on, and thus, carry more weight in a consumer鈥檚 decision-making process.
That鈥檚 why high-quality reviews often get top billing on a product鈥檚 page 鈥� an effort to entice online shoppers to go with the 鈥渨isdom of the crowd.鈥�
But new research published in Management Information Systems Quarterly reveals 鈥� surprisingly 鈥� that consumers鈥� use of online reviews in decision-making might not be as deliberative and logical as commonly believed.
鈥淩eviews that get more exposure can substantially and automatically shape consumers鈥� purchase decisions,鈥� said Dezhi Yin, an associate professor in the School of Information Systems and Management in the USF Muma College of Business, who co-authored the study.
鈥淩eview exposure holds more sway than review elaborateness, and this difference is even greater for negative reviews than positive reviews,鈥� he said.
The article 鈥�,鈥� was published online on March 1 in MIS Quarterly, a premier journal included among the top 24 business journals compiled by the University of Texas at Dallas.
Yin said the study鈥檚 nuanced findings offer important practical implications for review platforms, product manufacturers and retailers on how to better showcase online reviews.
Researchers recommend review platforms and online retailers do the following:
- Reconsider the effectiveness of highlighting the top reviews. Currently the most helpful reviews appear as top reviews based on the intuitive belief that they are most relevant for consumers. However, that strategy might be misguided because reviews with higher exposure are more persuasive, Yin said.
When giving consumers the option to see more reviews, Yin suggests only showing additional reviews and not repeating the top reviews to reduce undue, additional exposure of the same reviews.
- When designing the display of reviews, online retailers should consider how often reviews are seen.
Yin also urged retailers to take a balanced approach when dealing with an increasing number of reviews.
The researchers conducted two controlled experiments using positive and negative reviews for a hypothetical online purchase of a compact and foldable wireless mouse. Each study involved positive and negative reviews of the mouse; the reviews were designed in such a way that participants needed to weigh elaborate product details versus repeated exposure before reaching a purchase decision, allowing researchers to assess consumers鈥� unconscious trade-offs.
Aside from Yin, the article鈥檚 co-authors include Zhanfei Lei from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Han Zhang from the Georgia Institute of Technology.