How do social-based cues influence consumers’ online purchase decisions? An event-related potential study

Product rating and sales are two important social-based cues in online shopping. This study applies the event-related potential (ERP) approach to explore the underlying neural mechanism of the joint influence of these two cues on consumers’ decision-making. Behavioral data show that product rating has a greater impact on the purchasing rate than sales, which positively moderates the latter’s effect and supports cue-diagnosticity theory. Electrophysiological data provide further explanations for the observed behavioral pattern. Analyses of main ERP components suggest that consumers go through a series of cognitive processes from processing of perceived risk (N2) and informational conflict (N400) to evaluative categorization (LPP) before making the final purchasing decision. Specifically, product rating significantly influences the risk perception while the combination of high rating and low sales elicits significant cognitive conflict. Both cues are adopted by consumers to make an overall evaluation based on their similarity to the criterion.