Impact of National Culture on Online Consumer Review Behavior

Abstract

This research aims to investigate culture impact on the content of helpful online consumer reviews. Two distinct cultures, American and Chinese, were selected for comparison. The hypothesized culture effects were empirically examined with online customer reviews data collected from both amazon.com and amazon.cn. The data was first analyzed with a qualitative method to encode the content of online reviews, and then the encoded data were analyzed with a quantitative method to test the hypotheses. The results show that American reviews are more likely to express their own opinions on products and American reviews contain more recommendations to others than Chinese reviews. In addition, Chinese and American customer reviews focus on different aspects of the products. The findings of this study can be used to improve customer relationship and product marketing in globalized e-commerce.