Unveil the ignored prewriting stage: linking the efforts input in the prewriting stage with how consumers write their online reviews
Publication Date
1-1-2025
Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Electronic Commerce Research
DOI
10.1007/s10660-025-10003-5
Abstract
Online consumer reviews can help businesses understand consumers’ needs and wants, generate electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) to increase sales, and thus have significant business value. Consumers have emotional, psychological, social, and altruistic motivations to write and post online reviews. However, writing online reviews requires effort and incurs time and hassle. The effort does not start from the actual writing moment but begins with consumers’ intention to write online reviews after consumption. This study links the consumers’ effort input in the prewriting stage with how consumers write their online reviews, namely, the linguistic characteristics of reviews. How consumers write their reviews determines the attractiveness and trustworthiness perceived by peer consumers and thus can arouse their empathy and resonance, calling for the importance of studying this important topic. Our empirical findings suggest that a higher prewriting effort reduces review length and readability but increases review clout, tone, authority, and analytical thinking. In addition, the prewriting effort positively affects consumer overall ratings. The interactions of various prewriting efforts have a positive moderating effect on online review linguistic styles and ratings. Our findings offer important managerial implications for businesses to optimally design their review website to affect consumers’ information search process and the associated time and hassle costs to input the appropriate effort to write reviews with a favorable linguistic style. Businesses thus can better utilize online reviews with favorable linguistic features to enhance the eWOM effect to attract potential consumers and improve sales and financial performance.
Keywords
E-commerce, Linguistic characteristics, Online consumer reviews, Prewriting effort
Department
Global Innovation and Leadership
Recommended Citation
Xun Xu and Yiru Wang. "Unveil the ignored prewriting stage: linking the efforts input in the prewriting stage with how consumers write their online reviews" Electronic Commerce Research (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10660-025-10003-5
