Cultural aspect of informational and normative influences on purchasing intentions: An eye-tracking approach

ABSTRACT

Prior studies have examined into the importance of the effect of online reviews on product sales, the valence of online reviews on decision-making. However, few studies have focused on the informational and normative influences on consumers’ acquisition of information on product review pages, and how those influences affect consumers’ purchasing intent. Through a quantitative survey and an eye-tracking method, the impact of each components of a product review site (informational and normative influences) and their purchasing intentions were measured. The results suggest that the user-interface of a social commerce site should be localized to encourage higher sales conversions. Based on the fixation results, among all the product review page components, Japanese pay more attention to the product description, whereas Americans pay more attention to the product rating, regardless of the product type (hedonic versus utilitarian). Managerial implications include adjusting the positioning of the product review page components differently for their target audience, especially on their product list page where each product has a limited amount of descriptions.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Dr. Katherine B. Martin (Tobii Pro) for her feedback on the eye-tracking analysis.