Building the long bridge between visitors and customers through online general reviews

Abstract

Purpose

Many reviews on the internet are contributed their time to evaluate which are largely transparent generally; however, How are these information valuable and useful to visitors before making a purchasing decision? As the reason, there is a need to understand the distal path of visitors concern. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effects of both perceived useful and valuable motivations on visitors’ willingness to buy in the distal paths.

Design/methodology/approach

Web questionnaire survey.

Findings

Visitors’ confirmation was the beginning to impact the intention to buy through only one distal path, perceived value (PV) and satisfaction.

Research limitations/implications

Even though the author tried his best to design and implement thoughtfully for this research, there are still some limitations. First, the results could be influenced by self-selection bias. The sample of respondents surveyed in this study consisted of young adults (58.90 percent were between the ages 21 and 25 years old), the majority of whom (54.79 percent) were students. Therefore, in the context of this study, the visitors surveyed were young and able to easily access information online. The phenomenon has been, proved by Hsu (2013), found, it still needs to explore further. Second, perceived usefulness did not have a significant impact on satisfaction which consistent with Tao et al. (2009) result. The data represent the response’ feeling for now; it needs to be explored further. Third, it would also be worthwhile to investigate any obstacles, such as believable (Cheung et al., 2012) that might reduce the intentions to buy of visitors. Finally, recommendations and promotions have also been found to influence visitors’ further purchasing behavior, such as extra buy (Tsao, 2013). These phenomena are worth investigating in future research.

Practical implications

To inspire visitors, information of reviews can be posted by offering positive or negative suggestions (e.g. good or bad experience); managers should improve their products or services from the suggestions of reviews and need to consider the distinctive influences of various aspects of reviews when promoting products and devising e-marketing strategies. Marketers should recruit and filter reviews to write positive suggestions of their own products or service. IS practitioners should post the reviews might need to provide more detailed information (e.g. the reasons of like or dislike). The posted information from reviews should be accurate, particularly aiming at visitors who are motivated by reviews’ suggestions. All proposed measures are particularly important for visitors with sufficient reviews effects. Greater transparency of reviews might be achieved by more explicit reviews information (e.g. via like or dislike statements).

Social implications

The result provides a basis to generate concrete advice for owners about reviews concern to enhance visitors’ PV. It seems sensible to pursue two strategies: first, enhance the visitors’ PV to trigger motivation forward, and second, inspire the visitors to progress smoothly in the visiting stage.

Originality/value

The results of the expectation-confirmation theory applied to reviews recommendations how important to employ for enterprises. These reviews were either directly given by experienced users or at least validated with their help to visitors. Therefore, the value is building the distal bridge between visitors and customers through online general reviews.

Citation

Tsao, W.-Y. (2019), "Building the long bridge between visitors and customers through online general reviews", Online Information Review, Vol. 43 No. 2, pp. 201-218. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-01-2016-0028