An Investigation on Impact of Online Review Keywords on Consumers’ Product Consideration of Clothing

Abstract

Consumers need external information to support their product evaluation, especially with regard to experiencing the product during online shopping. Review keywords provide aggregated information of online reviews for consumers. However, whether and how review keywords affect consumers’ product consideration is still unelucidated. Considering clothing as the research target, we built a model to depict the impacts of website-generated quality- and fit-related review keywords on consumers’ consideration of clothing by bridging cue diagnosticity frameworks and product uncertainty theory. The hypotheses were verified by analyzing the objective data collected from e-commerce platforms and experiments. Results indicate that quality-related review keywords have a more salient positive impact on clothing consideration compared with fit-related keywords. Meanwhile, further complementary analysis based on self-generated review keywords suggests that presenting consumers with social-related keywords and consumer buyback keywords can improve clothing consideration significantly. The research contributes to the literature of product consideration and online review keywords, and related findings can help the platforms and e-merchants to better leverage the advantages of online review keywords.