Examining the Effect of Reviewer Socioeconomic Status Disclosure on Customers' Purchase Intention

Introduction

Online reviews have become an important product information source for consumers as they make final purchase decision; therefore, online reviews are considered to be an indispensable tool for online vendors to promote their products (Pan & Zhang, 2011; Khare et al., 2011). For the benefits of buyers and vendors, most shopping websites across the globe have been constantly developing their review systems to improve consumers’ shopping experiences (Srinivasan et al., 2002), to help them make better purchase decisions, and to increase vendors’ sales (Chen et al., 2011).

Currently, image reviews, a form of online reviews, are becoming more common in review systems for most leading shopping websites, such as Amazon.com and Taobao.com. By using customer image reviews, online vendors want to attract more potential customers and improve their own profitability. Image reviews present product pictures that customers take personally, even customers’ selfies with the products. Image reviews often disclose actual customers’ social status information unintentionally. In other words, online vendors just intend to attract more customers via trustworthy image reviews, but the reviews often present unintentional social status cues of reviewers at the same time. Online vendors have to consider whether the social status disclosures of reviewers would positively impact customers’ purchase intention.

In practice, most text-based online reviews do not disclose any social status information from reviewers, especially from anonymous ones (Forman et al., 2008). On the other hand, most image-based online reviews disclose reviewers’ social status cues more or less when actual customers present product images within reviews. However, previous research only targeted sources disclosure based on verbal descriptive information in text reviews, such as reviewers’ real name, location (Forman et al.,2008), low versus high occupation status (security guard vs. architect) (Shalev & Morwitz, 2012), and demographic similarity (gender, age, occupation and education). Although image-based online reviews have started to interest some scholars, little is known about the effect of social status disclosure of reviewers on image-based online reviews.

Past research has demonstrated that prior customers’ socioeconomic status (SES) could influence purchase intention of potential customers (Shalev & Morwitz, 2012). Extending this perspective to image-based online reviews, the current research examines the effect of reviewers’ SES on the purchase intentions of potential customers based on image reviews. Utilizing product consumption theory, the authors further argue the moderation effect of different product consumed settings on social status effect. The authors also demonstrate the underlying mechanism of social status effect. Moreover, the authors discuss an effective way to improve SES positive impact. To test the hypotheses, the authors use experimental method. The authors’ work deepens the understanding of reviewers’ social status effect in theory. In practice, the findings in this research could benefit online vendors by identifying more persuasive image reviews. The research results also provide clear instructions about how to improve customers’ purchase intention by technologically deal with image reviews.