An Empirical Analysis of the Impact of Online Reviews on Product Sales in the Chinese Context

Online reviews, as one kind of new marketing methods, are becoming increasingly important in influencing preferences and decision-making of consumers. In view of this, this paper conducts an empirical study on Dangdang Books, constructs a research framework on correlation between product sales and aspects of online reviews, and explores the correction through the panel data econometric model. Compared to former research, our work analyzes real data on product sales instead of the rank of sales. Based on our study results and comparison with others´ research results on Amazon (amazon.com), we provide several guiding suggestions for online review systems in the Chinese context. These systems should pay attention to emotional tendency of reviews, reviewer ranking mechanisms, spotlight reviews, review format and review voting mechanisms.