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As a major way for consumers to obtain product information when they are shopping online, online reviews significantly influence purchase decisions of consumers (Ahmad & Laroche, 2016; Zhu & Zhang 2010), and also provide a large amount of product and market information for vendors (Cui et al., 2012; Duan et al., 2008). Benefiting from the popularity of smart phones, tablets and other smart devices possessing high-quality photos taking and videos recording, image-based reviews and video-based reviews gradually emerge on some leading vendors websites. In the study, text-based reviews refer to reviews, uploaded by consumers, barely contain text information. However, image-based reviews include text and image information, and texts combined with videos are shown in video-based reviews. In practice, the images and videos compared with texts can offer more multisensory cues and dynamic information to display product (Xu et al., 2015). Head of JD, e-commerce giant in China, once indicated that the short video would become the standard configuration information of the product digitization. Besides, some shopping websites have been stimulating consumers to post pictures or videos by cash rewards in order to attract more buyers and add more sales, and labeling “images or videos” to facilitate consumers to search all images and videos more speedily in China. Alike practitioners, scholars are also concentrated on how review presentation formats affect consumers’ decisions.
Purchase intentions can be considered as the degree of consumers intend to buy the products (Botha & Reyneke, 2015). Scholars have widely examined the factors that promoted purchase intentions to consumers. Previous researchers have shown the impact of review characteristics on purchase intentions, such as review quantity (Park et al., 2007), and perceived trust (Awad & Ragowsky, 2008), perceived risk (Chiu et al., 2013; Dai et al., 2014) had an influence on purchase intentions. However, vast of the researches have concerned on text-based reviews, which was the main presentation formats over the past years. With the popularity of smart devices and demand of consumers, scholars gradually turned to study other presentation formats, such as image-based reviews or video-based reviews (Liu & Du, 2019; Xu et al., 2015; Yoo & Kim, 2014). But their conclusions were inconsistent. Compared with image information, video-based reviews could provide more detailed product information, thus increasing consumers’ perceived value (Yin et al., 2021). Compared with text-based reviews, image-based reviews provided higher perceived product understanding ((Liu & Du, 2019). Some scholars had different opinions, which found that consumers were more dependent on text information, image information was just a verification of the text expression (Hughes et al., 2003). Thus, to clarify this relationship, the study prepares to further examine the influence of review presentation formats of text-based reviews, image-based reviews and video-based reviews on purchase intentions.
A key of impediment of online shopping is the lack of sensory experience on the computer screen. Researchers have demonstrated that perception of products have become one of the most remarkable factors influencing consumers’ intentions regarding shopping online (Jiang & Benbasat, 2007). Consequently, the first question the research focuses on becomes particularly important: (1) Which review presentation formats have higher impact on purchase intentions for consumers. In addition, the behaviors of consumers’ seeking and learning depend on product type, that is to say different kinds of information adapt to different product type (Xu et al., 2015; Mudambi & Schuff, 2010). So, the second question to discuss: (2) Under the comparison of different product types, each review presentation formats can provide higher impact on purchase intention for different product type.