Online WOM effects and product type: Evidence from Tmall

DOI

10.2991/jimet-15.2015.101How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Online WOM effects, Product type, online user reviews, Search products, Experience products

Abstract

This paper examines the persuasive effect and the awareness effect of online user reviews on product sales. Using publicly available data from a China-based B2C e-commerce site under the Alibaba Group—Tmall.com, we show that rating of online user reviews has no significant impact on product sales after controlling the influence of product price. However, we find that the review volume has significant and positive influence on product sales. More, to uncover the underlying mechanisms behind online WOM effects, we compare search products and experience products. Our results show that the effect of online user reviews is much larger for experience goods than for search goods. Our results also show that product price has no significant impact for search product, but has significant negative impact for experience products.

Copyright

© 2015, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Qihua Liu
PY  - 2015/12
DA  - 2015/12
TI  - Online WOM effects and product type: Evidence from Tmall
BT  - Proceedings of the 2015 Joint International Mechanical, Electronic and Information Technology Conference
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 536
EP  - 539
SN  - 2352-538X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/jimet-15.2015.101
DO  - 10.2991/jimet-15.2015.101
ID  - Liu2015/12
ER  -