The Impact of Merchant's Response to Negative Reviews on Consumers' Purchase Intention

Online reviews, either positive or negative, are regarded as an important source of information for potential consumers. Previous research discovered that negative reviews have a negative impact on consumers, whereas the merchant's response on negative reviews could moderate the negative effect to certain extent. This paper will explore the impact of merchants' responses, in which two types of responses (Apologetic responses and Unified responses) are identified and considered to influence consumer purchasing intentions. Moreover, positive emotions and perceived trust are involved to explore how merchants' responses attract potential consumers and drive purchasing behaviors. The result of this study carried out among 211 participants shows that, comparing with unified responses, there are higher positive emotions, perceived trusts and purchase intentions on apologetic response. When consumers are exposed to different merchants' responses, perceived trust plays a mediating role in their intentions of purchasing. Additionally, the mediating effect of positive emotions is not significant. This research also confirms that positive emotions evoked by the merchants' responses are significantly influential to perceived trust.