Do consumers prefer to buy dietary supplements online? Modeling sales prediction leveraging word of mouth

Abstract

Purpose

In online purchase for dietary supplements, due to the lack of professional advice from pharmacists, electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) has become an important source of information for consumers to make purchase decisions. How can firms use eWOM resources to increase sales? The purpose of this paper is to provide practical methods for firms by exploring the effects of eWOM on sales and developing a sales prediction model based on eWOM.

Design/methodology/approach

The data came from 120 dietary supplements on Tmall.com. The authors extracted the product sales as dependent variable and 11 eWOM factors as independent variables. The multicollinearity was tested by using variance inflation factor and least absolute shrinkage and selection operator. The multiple linear regression was used to investigate the effects of eWOM on sales. Drawing on white- and black-box approaches, six models were developed. Comparing the root mean square error, the authors selected the optimal one as their target sales prediction model.

Findings

Product ratings, total reviews and favorites are positively and strongly associated with sales. Questions and additional reviews have negative effects on sales. The random forest model has the best prediction performance.

Originality/value

The research focuses on eWOM of dietary supplement. First, the authors show that easily accessible eWOM from online platforms can be used to evaluate effects and predict sales. Second, the authors introduce white- and black-box models through machine learning to assess eWOM. Firms could use the described models to foster their marketing initiatives.

Citation

Bai, Y., Li, X. and Sun, H. (2024), "Do consumers prefer to buy dietary supplements online? Modeling sales prediction leveraging word of mouth", International Journal of Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Marketing, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPHM-03-2023-0020