Online reviews and high-involvement product sales: Evidence from offline sales in the Chinese automobile industry

Online reviews are considered free sales assistance and play an important role in consumers' purchasing de-cisions. Most research on the effect of online reviews on product sales has focused on low-involvement products, while research on the offline sales of high-involvement products is scarce. In this study, we collect the monthly sales data of 34 car models from January 2016-January 2020 and the online review data of Autohome's platform to construct two two-way fixed effects models for analyzing the impact of online reviews on sales of high -involvement products. We also explore whether there is a non-linear relationship between online review valence and product sales, and how the interaction of review valence and volume affects product sales. The results show that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between the valence of online reviews and the sales of high-involvement products. Moreover, the volume of online reviews has a significant positive impact on sales of high-involvement products, and an increase in the volume of online reviews boosts product sales. Further-more, the valence of online reviews negatively moderates the relationship between the volume of online reviews and the sales of high-involvement products. The results of this study may help researchers to more fully un-derstand the impact of online reviews on offline high-involvement product sales and provide guidance for managers to promote offline high-involvement products.