"Ask Everyone?" Understanding How Social Q&A Feedback Quality Influences Consumers' Purchase Intentions

Social question & answer (Q&A) feedback is a novel form of electronic word-of-mouth that allows customers to ask questions and share opinions with peer customers. Based on the stimulus-organism-response framework, this paper proposes a model to describe how social Q&A feedback quality affects consumers' willingness to purchase by influencing their perceived risk, perceived usefulness, and use intention. We focused on the social Q&A feature named Ask Everyone in Taobao and collected 153 valid responses through an online survey. Canonical correlation analysis was used to identify the association between feedback characteristics and feedback quality. Then, PLS-SEM was conducted to test the proposed research model. Results show that feedback quality negatively associated with perceived risk, but had a positive impact on perceived usefulness, use intention, and purchase intention. Findings of this research has both theoretical and practical implications for facilitating social Q&A design in e-commerce platforms. Keywords: social Q&A, feedback quality, purchase intentions 1. INTRODUCTION Word-of-mouth (WOM) communication is an important way to transfer information between consumers, and is an important supplement and evaluation of products. Arndt [1] originally defined WOM as a non-profit oral communication initiated by propagators and related to products or services. With the emergence of social commerce, consumers often rely on information shared by peer consumers who have purchased the same product to make their own decisions on purchase. Prior research on online reviews show that problems such as duplication, redundancy and even fake reviews can mislead consumers and the trustworthiness of online review has been raised as a concern by both researchers and practitioners [2, 3] . In the past a few years, some leading e-commerce websites (such as Taobao in China) launched a novel social Q&A feature named Ask Everyone. Those who are interested in a product can ask questions about peer customers who have purchased the same product before. Such Q&A interaction is displayed below the product information for other consumers to refer to when they are browsing the product online. As a new form of social Q&A, Ask Everyone shows the actual buyers' perceptions and experiences of products. Through such social interaction, consumers are not constrained by what is available on the product introduction page. Social Q&A feature allows consumers to acquire product information from peer consumers so that they may be less concerned with redundant or fake reviews [4] . This is very important for consumers to make shopping decisions. Meanwhile, the social Q&A feature turns one-way WOM into a more interactive form and brings more opportunities to enable consumers to flexibly describe their questions and selectively refer to answers. On the other hand, the emerge of social Q&A feature is important to e-commerce platforms as it demands e-commerce platforms to optimize the design of such social Q&A features and support consumers to make better informed decisions. This paper studies how to evaluate Q&A feedback quality, and constructs a model of how Q&A feedback quality influences consumers' purchase intentions, based on the S-O-R framework in environmental psychology * Corresponding author. Email: jiantang@cufe.edu. cn (Jian Tang) 576 The Eighteenth Wuhan International Conference on E-Social Network and Commerce [5] . We conducted a survey to collect data to validate our research hypotheses. This study provides a theoretical basis for exploring the impact of Q&A feedback quality on consumers’ use intentions and their subsequent purchase intentions. In addition, the results of this study can provide effective guidelines for e-commerce platforms to improve their social Q&A design and further support consumers’ shopping decisions. 2. LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Stimulus-organism-response framework The Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) framework was proposed by Mehrabian&Russell [5] to describe how environment stimuli affect human internal reactions and behavioral responses. A complete S-O-R framework must have external stimulus variables, the body's perception as a mediator, and the body's behavior as a response variable. The relationship between stimulation and response is well represented by mediator variables. The S-O-R framework is often applied to explain the consumer's decision-making behavior in the shopping environment. Eroglu, Machleit&Davis [6] used the S-O-R framework to explain the impact of external stimuli on consumer behavior through emotion and perception as an intermediary state in online retail. The model believes that the external environment's stimulus will affect the consumer's internal state, which in turn affects consumer behavior. The internal state includes emotion, internal perception, etc. Internal perception is divided into perceived usefulness and perceived risk. 2.2 Q&A feedback Q&A feedback is introduced by the Q&A knowledge community. The Q&A community is a network platform that users frequently use to create information spontaneously in recent years. On this question and answer platform, the user can act as both a questioner and an answerer to provide answers through their own experiences and accumulated knowledge. However, because any user is free to create information, there is a huge difference in the quality of the information in the Q&A community. Jeon, Croft, Lee&Park [7] constructed a retrieval model from the perspective of non-textual features of information to evaluate the quality of information answered in the Q&A community. The classification method was adopted by Agichtein, Castillo, Donato, Gionis&Mishne [8] to study the characteristics of the text, supporting that information quality is reflected in textual characteristics of information. 2.3 Purchase intention Intention refers to the willingness of an individual to perform certain behavior, which is an immediate antecedent of actual behavior. Purchase intention is usually considered as an immediate antecedent of purchase behavior. Based on the technology acceptance model, Gefen, Karahanna&Straub [9] proposed that the reliability, ease of use and usefulness of shopping websites are positive factors affecting the purchase intention of online shopping consumers. Perceived risk was found to reduce the likelihood of consumers’ purchase behavior [10] . Rabjohn, Cheung&Lee [11] consider relevant information to be useful and acceptable to consumers from the perspective of information quality and information sources. 3. RESEARCH MODEL AND HYPOTHESES This paper constructs a model of the impact of Q&A feedback quality on e-commerce consumers' purchase intentions based on the S-O-R framework. The Q&A feedback quality in the model is used as the stimulus variable S, perceived usefulness, perceived risk and use intention as the mediator variable O, and the consumer's willingness to purchase as the final response variable R. We propose this model to depict how Q&A feedback quality influences consumers' purchase intentions through three mediators. The model is shown in Fig.1. The Eighteenth Wuhan International Conference on E-Social Network and Commerce 577 Figure 1. Research Model Q&A feedback quality includes sufficiency, correlation, accuracy, and objectivity. Sufficient information can help consumers to understand the characteristics of a product more comprehensively and completely, so that consumers can evaluate the product, have a more comprehensive understanding of the product, and reduce the risk of adverse consequences after purchasing the product. Three mediator variables are as follows. Perceived usefulness refers to the usefulness of consumer perception Q&A feedback in the purchase decision process. Perceived risk refers to the estimation of the degree of loss caused by the loss of the performance of the product in advance in the process of online shopping. Use intention refers to the subjective likelihood and probability that the consumer will continue to use the Q&A feedback function. The dependent variable is purchase intention, which refers to the subjective possibility and probability that the consumer is willing to purchase a specific product. Shen [12] argued that the online shopping consumers are more concerned about the true reliability of the information, identifying hat the real and reliable information is negatively correlated with the perceived risk. Rabjohnet al. [11] showed in the study that sufficiency can explain the details of products more comprehensively; relevance provides convenience for consumers to purposefully search for information. Korfiatis, GarcíA-Bariocanal&SáNchez-Alonso [13] pointed out that user perceptions are influenced by real and objective online reviews that make consumers think they are helpful. Shen [12] found through a survey of online shopping for users that the quality of online reviews affects consumers' understanding and trust in product characteristics, which ultimately affects use intention. Therefore, this paper proposes the following hypotheses: H1: Q&A feedback quality is negatively related to perceived risk. H2: Q&A feedback quality is positively related to perceived usefulness. H3: Q&A feedback quality is positively related to use intention. Erogluet al. [6] used perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use as two influencing factors of user's willingness in the technology acceptance model (TAM). Perceived risk of product can impair consumers’ diagonisity of product, lowering their perceptions of usefulness of the shopping site [14] . Gefen et al. [9] confirmed that the perceived useful is positively correlated with the use intention. Therefore, this study proposes the following hypotheses: H4: Perceived risk is negatively related to perceived usefulness. H5: Perceived usefulness is positively related to use intention. Yang&Qian [15] found that the quality of online word-of-mouth is positively corr