Behavioural Insights into Gen Z Shoppers: The Effect of Online Reviews Across Indian E-Commerce Platforms

The mushrooming of online commercial platforms in India has greatly transformed the consumer decision-making processes, especially to Generation Z consumers who use digital information cues critically. This paper looks at how online reviews impact purchase behaviour of the leading Indian e-commerce platforms with particular focus on the importance of trust as an important explanatory variable. The research design was a quantitative cross-sectional study, the primary data was collected using a structured questionnaire that measured in terms of a five-point Likert scale and 286 Generation Z respondents (age 21-26 years) were used. The data were analyzed through the multiple regression analysis in SPSS and the results indicate that online review attributes significantly and positively affect purchase behaviour ( 0.463, p = 0.001), and trust also influences this purchase behaviour significantly and positively ( 0.321, p = 0.001). It has been shown that the regression model has a high level of explanatory power and it explains 47.9 percent of the variance in purchase behaviour (R 2 =0.479). Moreover, the independent sample t-test findings show that Amazon users have a much higher level of trust than Flipkart users.The findings are also affirmative that the perceptions of review credibility, volume, and authenticity are strongly influential in influencing transactional confidence among the Gen Z generation of consumers. This study, by empirically confirming the relationship between review and trust and behaviour in the Indian e-commerce environment, will add to the body of literature and will help in emphasising the strategic relevance of trustworthy review management systems in the environment of ever-present digital consumer trust.