Impacts of Online Additional Reviews on the Sales Volume of Cross-Border Pharmaceutical E-Commerce Platforms

Recently, additional reviews, as a new form of online reviews, have attracted attention among the academia. However, it remains unclear whether the existing findings from initial reviews apply to the additional reviews. Based on the attribution theory, this paper explores the impacts of different attributes of online additional reviews on the sales volume of cross-border pharmaceutical platforms, and the moderate role of country-of-origin. Using addition reviews data and product information from Alihealth.tall.com, this paper successfully tests these hypotheses. The results show that the number of additional reviews and the interval between initial and additional reviews have significant positive effects on sales, and moderated by country-of-origin. However, the number of super members making additional reviews is not associated with product sales. Our findings have several implications: firstly, the additional reviews still is an important information for consumers, while attributes has different effects on products sales; secondly, information of country of origin associated with additional reviews can influence the evaluation of products.