Effect of online review sentiment on product sales: The moderating role of review credibility perception

Online reviews are of great importance in supporting the purchasing decision making of online consumers. With the prospering of e-commerce, increasingly fraudulent reviews are appearing on e-commerce platforms to mislead consumers, and an increasing number of consumers are worrying about being deceived in online shopping. However, little research effort has been invested in studying the impact of review credibility perception caused by online review fraud on product sales. To fill this research gap, this paper conducts empirical research on the moderating effect of consumers' credibility perception of online reviews. Here, review credibility perception, or consumers' credibility perception of online reviews, refers to the credibility or trust that consumers have in the reviews they are reading. Building on dual-process theory, this paper develops two hypotheses to understand why and how review credibility perception influence consumer decision-making behaviors. The empirical studies in this paper demonstrate that consumers' credibility perception of online reviews moderate the effect of review sentiment on product sales. This work also found that consumers' credibility perception of online reviews have a heterogeneous effect on product sales. The effect shifts the relationship between review sentiment and product sales from an inverted U-shape relationship to a monotonous positive relationship with the improvement of consumers’ credibility perception of online reviews. This study has great managerial implications for platforms and vendors to improve online review management.