Washington, Nov 15 (ANI): A new study from Binghamton University has suggested that trumpeting consumer-behaviour statistics on websites may help online retailers boost their sales.
Qi Wang, an associate professor of marketing at Binghamton University, studied the effects of user comments and sales statistics that accompany products offered on e-commerce sites.
While the impact of positive and negative feedback has been well understood, much less was known about so-called "observational behaviour" - aka a person's tendency to adopt the same habits as his or her peers.
"Households make decisions by following what they see their neighbours doing. People learn from their peers what to buy," Wang said.
For online marketers, word-of-mouth recommendations are displayed in the form of customer reviews. If the site also reveals statistics on how many users purchased the product, the shopper also can be influenced by observational behaviour.
Wang analysed data on 90 brands of digital cameras from Amazon.com, which includes a section disclosing the percentage of people who bought the product after viewing it.
She and her colleagues found that positive observational behaviour data boosted sales, while negative observations had little influence.
The results dispel a myth in e-commerce that consumers are likely to be discouraged if they see a low percentage of peers following through with the purchase.
"It's good news for manufacturers who haven't had a lot of people buy their product. If it's a niche market just targeting a small group of consumers, they don't have to worry because there is no harm in releasing this type of information," Wang added.
The findings were published in the Journal of Marketing Research. (ANI)
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