Abstract
With the integration of social media and e-commerce, social media review platforms provide consumers with a place to share information and create electronic word of mouth (e-WOM). Information from e-WOM plays an important role in consumers’ decision-making process. However, the information adoption process of users of social media review platforms remains unclear. Thus, this study builds a model to investigate how information quality affects individual information adoption on e-commerce platforms and explores the moderating effects of perceived risk on information quality, perceived diagnosticity, and information credibility. Structural equation modeling and regression analysis are used to test the proposed model. Results show that information quality consists of content quality, expression quality, and utility quality, all of which effectively affect the information adoption on socialized e-commerce platforms through perceived diagnosticity and information credibility. Findings also suggest that perceived risk positively moderates the effects of information quality on perceived diagnosticity.
1. Introduction
Internet technology has played a huge role in our daily life and the accumulation of massive information has soared, affecting the transaction model and experience environment of online retail and the sharing economy (Olmedilla et al., 2019). With the maturity of social commerce and Web 3.0, along with the update and optimization of social media, the exchange of information between consumers has been further accelerated. For economic platform carriers and providers of service and product, the electronic word of mouth (e-WOM) information presented on the Internet has an important effect on the selection and purchase of products or services. When product trading was done offline with point-to-point interaction, the dissemination of product quality and value was with the help of retailer advertising, and the real effect perception was transmitted by consumers face to face or through media. At present, consumers’ positive or negative online comments on specific products or services on the web are the main form of e-WOM information. Before making purchase decisions, consumers not only search for product or service information but also read reviews posted by other users (Utz et al., 2012). These online reviews serve as a primary information source for consumers to make purchase decisions (Ahn and Choi, 2012; Jiang et al., 2016). Thus, many e-commerce companies are aware of the value of online reviews and offer special web-based platforms for consumers to communicate and post their online reviews (Chevalier and Mayzlin, 2006 Jiang et al., 2020a; Jiang et al., 2020b).
