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Online consumer reviews have been accepted as one of the primary sources of product information (Chen et al. 2016) and commonly used by global online shoppers (Yin et al. 2016). Global online marketplaces, such as Alibaba and Amazon, provide ways for consumers to write online reviews about their product usage experience. Regular online reviews written by consumers commonly provide information on single products and are referred to as regular reviews in this study. In a competitive market where alternative products are introduced to satisfy customer requirements, potential buyers typically research for alternative products and select the one that provides the maximum value for the allocated budget. As such, multiple reviews are read (Park et al. 2007). However, differences among user preferences and associated shared information may confuse potential buyers and lead to inappropriate purchases (Vali et al. 2015). For example, consider that a professional photographer rates camera A with above-average features as weak, whereas an amateur photographer rates camera B with few features as strong. Due to inconsistent consumer preferences, a buyer may make an incorrect purchase by selecting camera B with a strong rating but few features.
To address the issues of reviews written by different consumers, we propose a new type of online review, the mixed comparative review, which is a single review written by one consumer to compare two products on the same product attributes. Below are examples of a regular review and a mixed comparative review found on Amazon.com.
Regular review: “Recreational, uses a phone as a communication device and for fun: iPhone. The camera and social apps are fun to use on the iPhone.”
Mixed comparative review: “Photographer, blogger, foodie: iPhone 8 still has the best selection of apps and arguably the best camera. Samsung’s camera is slow, and the company is known to really bog down its stellar devices with bloatware that ruins or significantly slows down your phone after one year of use.”
Apart from mixed comparative and regular reviews, buyers can access another type of review, that is, two regular reviews written by two different people about two different products (Park et al. 2007). We name this combination as separate comparative reviews. However, different from the mixed comparative reviews written by one consumer, separate comparative reviews written by two consumers with different preferences may result in potential buyer confusion. We include this type of review in our study because in normal circumstances, a buyer likely uses this approach to access consumer reviews about two different products (Park et al. 2007). Marketing literature has proposed comparative advertisements; however, no study has evaluated the effect of this type of comparative message in the online review context.