Abstract:
The Internet is an essential and fundamental pillar of modern information society,
connecting billions of people around the world. Customer reviews have helped
online business enterprises to improve their businesses. At least one third of the
internet users welcome product reviews and actively posts their own content
experience, and most of online customers used to refer, before purchase decisions.
According to prevailing literature, customer reviews towards online purchase
intention studies are limited in global level and rare in local level, and a research
was conducted in the selected study area to find out the impact of customer reviews
towards online purchasing intention. To carry out the study, model was developed
based on Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) and Theory of Reasoned Action
(TRA) by identifying review timeliness, review quantity,visual image quality, and
review ratings as independent variables, and online purchase intention as
dependent variable. Empirical survey was conducted among 205 undergraduates
from selected four faculties of Rajarata university of Sri Lanka through distributing
a pretested structured questionnaire based on stratified sampling technique.
Undergraduates were selected because they are representing younger generation of
the population of the country, heterogeneous group of people, and they are very
helpful in theresearch. Correlation analysis, regression analysis and ANOVA were
tested using Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) software. The result
revealed that, all four hypotheses were accepted, and significant positive
relationship among online purchasingintention and all independent variables. Most
influential factors were identified as visual image quality followed by review
timeliness. Valuable suggestions, recommendations, and guidelines for future
researches were discussed in brief.
