Impact of Online Review on Sales: An Empirical Investigation of Experience Products with Different Popularities

Abstract

As E-Commerce becomes a trend and habit in people's lives, online reviews have become a useful marketing tool and important factor of business success. Based on recent research, this paper categorizes experience products into popular and less popular classes, and makes an empirical study on online reviews on sales for different popularity products. Through collecting data on dangdang.com, and linear regression and empirical analysis, this paper gets the conclusion that comparing to popular products, less popular products' sales were more easily affected by online reviews. The B2C companies could optimize their marketing strategy by encouraging users to remark more on less popular goods. On the other hand, this paper contributes to the online review area on the idea of categorizing products and making analysis respectively.