INFLUENCE OF DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS ON CONSUMERS’ ONLINE REVIEW-BASED PURCHASE BEHAVIOR

Abstract

Consumers nowadays are being increasingly influenced by online reviews (ORs) of different review platforms on the web for making a purchase decision about a product or service. While existing literature has shed light on different factors of ORs that influence consumers’ purchase decisions, this study aims to find out the influence of consumers’ demographic characteristics on their purchase behavior based on ORs. By analyzing the data collected from 454 participants in Dhaka city, we found that consumers read the ORs for food, drink, and related services like restaurants followed by clothing, accessories, beauty, and personal care products. The study shows that most consumers search various channels for reviews, including search engines, social media, content communities, and review aggregators on merchants’ websites, instead of relying on just one platform. We also found that besides online purchases, ORs are useful for traditional offline purchases and such behavior varies across consumers’ demographic profiles like gender, age, and household monthly income. The study reveals that demographic characteristics, like age and household monthly income, influence how frequently consumers alter their decisions based on online reviews. Thus, this study is the first to explore how demographic factors affect consumers’ choice of shopping channels as well as the degree of variability in their purchase decisions both based on ORs. Finally, the implications of these findings for theory and practitioners have been outlined.