An Empirical Study on the Interaction Effects between the Customer Reviews and the Customer Incentives towards the Product Sales at the Online Retail Store

Online customer reviews (i.e., electronic word-of-mouth) has gained considerable interest over the past years. However, a knowledge gap exists in explaining the mechanisms among the factors that determine the product sales in online retailing environment. To fill the gap, this study adopts a principal-agent perspective to investigate the effect of customer reviews and customer incentives on product sales in online retail stores. Two customer review factors (i.e., average review ratings and the number of reviews) and two customer incentive factors (i.e., price discounts and special shipping offers) are used to predict product sales in regression analysis. The sales ranking data collected from the video game titles at Amazon.com are used to analyze the direct effects of the four factors and the interaction effects between customer review and customer incentive factors to product sales. Result reveals that most relationships exist as hypothesized. The findings support both the direct and interaction effects of customer reviews and incentive factors on product sales. Based on the findings, discussions are provided with regard to the academic and practical contributions.