Cross Cultural Study of Customers Online Reviews Intention of the E-commerce Platforms

Online reviews are necessary and important for e-commerce platform enterprises and online consumers, while most of online customers are reluctant to share their consumption experiences. What’s more, the intentions of contributing online reviews for most of customers may be influenced by their national culture for global e-commerce platforms. Motivated by such concerns, a theoretical model is formulated and tested, which can explain and compare national cultural difference of consumer reviews intention. The model is validated through an online survey. The results reveal that the perceived usefulness, reciprocity, reputation and review cost significantly impact consumer online reviews intention both in China and the USA, while economic rewards and perceived ease of use show little impact on consumer reviews intention significantly. And the group analysis indicates that the national cultural difference exists in the customers’ reviews intention. Then related managerial implications for e-commerce platform enterprises are discussed in the end. Introduction It is very important for e-commerce platforms and e-business enterprises to have or design a good customer reviews system. Customer reviews will not only impact on sales of the goods and services, but also reduce the uncertainty of consumer purchases. Online consumer reviews have become the most important basis for customers’ online shopping decisions. However, most of online shoppers are not willing to share their consumption experiences actively at e-commerce platforms for different reasons, such as privacy security, review costs, etc. How to effectively encourage consumers to write and post their consumption experiences actively at the customer review system of the e-commerce platforms, which is very necessary for e-business enterprises. To solve the problem, we should understand and interpret the motivation of customers contributing product reviews. What’s more, It is obviously that cultural differences exist in the user behavior. We would like to know whether there are also national cultural differences in the customers’ reviews motivations. Literature Review With the development of technology and network, user generated contents like product reviews have become more and more popular on the internet. While literature about the motivation of customer reviews is relatively few. Hennig-Thurau et al. (2004) is an early representative document of the research on the motivation of user's word of mouth, which revealed the primary motivation of user e-word-of-mouth communication, including social interaction, economic rewards, altruism, and reputation[1]. Munzel and Kunz (2014) showed that online users perceived a social debt to give something back to the online reviews system, which can be called reciprocity[2]. While review cost, such as consuming time, taking efforts and privacy security, sometimes impact on the contributing intentions of online reviewers. Some papers indicated that the review cost had a significant negative effect on the motivation of posting contents[3,4]. Research Framework The study assumes that online reviewers’ behavior intention at customer review system of the e-commerce platform is social exchange. The social exchange theory posits that all human behavior