Search product and experience product online reviews: An eye tracking study on consumers' review search behavior

This study uses eye-tracking method to investigate consumers' online review search behavior by suggesting that it needs to consider the type of product reviewed. A review-product congruity proposition was testified through a self-report survey and an eye-tracking experiment. The proposition states that consumers of search products expect to seek attribute based reviews, while consumers shopping for experience products tend to seek experience based reviews. Two experiments were conducted in the human factors & ergonomics laboratory of Beihang University, China and all subjects are college students. The results of our first empirical experiment support our hypotheses by showing consumers' more active and positive responses to attribute based reviews when shopping for search products and to experience based reviews when purchasing experience products. The second experiment was conducted with eye tracking method to gain further insights. We found that consumers of search products are attracted and engaged more deeply by attribute based reviews. However, when they browse experience products, the difference of their fixations on experience based reviews and attribute based reviews is not significant, and thus the proposition is partially supported. This study extends our current understanding of consumers' online review search behavior by subsuming product type, which is necessary and helpful, and provides references on the classification and presentation of reviews to facilitate consumers' product judgement and decision making. Moreover, comparison of traditional empirical method and eye-tracking method can help deepen our understanding of complex consumer online shopping behavior. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.