The Impact of Positive and Negative Reviews on Consumer Purchase Intention

In recent years, driven by the rapid advancement of online retail, a growing number of consumers have opted to purchase goods through e-commerce platforms. Nowadays, the Internet has become an open platform for consumers to express their opinions. Consumers will leave their evaluations of the shopping experience along with accompanying pictures after making an online purchase. Nowadays, an increasing number of consumers have started to adjust their consumption decisions based on the number of reviews of an online store, the quality of those reviews, and the store's reputation. Existing research mainly focuses on the impact of diversified forms such as picture reviews, quality of service, inertia to change and so on, which can influence consumers' willingness to buy. But research on the display order of positive and negative reviews remains limited. Therefore, this paper mainly focuses on studying the influence of the priority order of positive and negative reviews on customers' purchase intention. This paper mainly adopts the methods of questionnaire surveys and regression models. According to the priority order, the reviews are divided into a control group, experimental group 1, and experimental group 2. The experimental results show that when consumers see negative reviews first and then positive reviews, it has a significant positive impact on their purchase intention; conversely, the impact of positive reviews being shown first is relatively weak. This paper mainly draws the following conclusions: First, giving priority to negative reviews is more conducive for merchants to increase sales. Second, compared with only presenting a simple introduction of the product, displaying more evaluations of the product from other consumers can increase customers' purchase intention. In addition, this study provides new evidence for merchants to boost sales and has important reference value for policymakers in making decisions in related aspects.