Online Reviews Affecting Purchase Intention of Consumers: A Meta-Analytical Literature Review

Many research have looked at elements impacting consumers’ purchase intention due to online reviews. The amount of study that has been done in the past and the discrepancy in some of the outcomes make it beneficial to create an all-encompassing model that combines the findings. To examine the consistency of the variables from earlier studies, a meta-analysis and random effect model were used in this paper to synthesize research findings on the effects of online review elements like perceived risk, trust, and credibility on consumers’ purchase intentions. Comprehensive meta-analysis software was used to perform meta analysis of 23 studies. Results from above discussed method exhibits significant effects of perceived risk of online reviews (r= 0.272, Z = 1.430) on purchase intention, trust towards online reviews (r=0.610, Z=9.621) on purchase intention and credibility of online reviews (r=0.437, Z=4.713) on purchase intention. Random effects meta-analysis method allows for variations in the treatment among studies. The effect of perceived risk on purchase intention is having the lowest correlation value among all the variables and trust is having the highest correlational value among the following. Result of the study shows trust is going to have the highest impact on consumers purchase intention. Primary disadvantage of the study is that there aren’t many studies accessible for meta-analysis because they were only collected in electronic form from databases like Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar. Future study should utilize a larger variety of datasets. Additionally, only quantitative research were taken into account in this analysis; qualitative studies were not. Therefore, future research might perform a meta-analysis using both types of studies. Managers may employ those variables in their marketing plan to draw customers by concentrating on the aspects that have a significant impact on purchase intention. Marketers may impact customer purchasing intentions, which in turn affects consumer purchase decisions, loyalty, and commitment, by better understanding how perceived intention, trust, and credibility are used. The use of meta-analysis enabled us to quantify the strength of the association between several characteristics, including perceived risk, trust, and credibility, on purchase intention, and helped to reconcile earlier findings”.