Negative reviews influence consumer decisions depending on the type of product, as well as the nature and placement of these reviews
A negative review leads to fewer product sales and instead uncovered how consumers’ purchase journey is influenced by unfavourable feedback.
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Consumers know there are a lot of fake reviews online. They tend to give more weight to negative reviews, assuming that these are more likely to be genuine.
Considering this, and the fact that humans have a strong negativity bias to begin with, negative reviews clearly influence purchase decisions. However, measuring their impact can be challenging. For a start, consumers do not always read reviews immediately upon visiting a product page. They may take their time exploring options and gathering information. Moreover, other factors like product availability or stock-outs can sway decisions.
In this complex web of influences, our study set out to quantify the effect of negative reviews on consumer behaviour. We went beyond the fact that a negative review leads to fewer product sales and instead uncovered how consumers’ purchase journey is influenced by unfavourable feedback.
We used a dataset from a large online retailer in the United Kingdom that offers a wide range of tech and home-and-garden products. As the dataset captures the entire buying process, it allowed us to track the steps consumers from their website arrival to potential purchase decision.
The retailer follows a policy of displaying the five most recent customer reviews on the product page. Viewing older reviews require visiting a second page – and most consumers do not do that. As newer reviews replace older ones, the composition of the five most recent reviews is constantly renewed, offering a quasi-natural experimental setting to understand how consumers make decisions when exposed to different set of reviews.
[This article is republished courtesy of INSEAD Knowledge, the portal to the latest business insights and views of The Business School of the World. Copyright INSEAD 2024]