The Effect of Word of Mouth on Sales: Online Book Reviews
2006/07/11 by Judith A. Chevalier, Dina Mayzlin · 5,987 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · Decision Sciences · Social Sciences · #Advertising #Amazon rainforest #Business #Consumer Market Behavior and Pricing #Digital Marketing and Social Media #Economics #Marketing #Technology Adoption and User Behaviour #Word of mouth
paper · doi:10.1509/jmkr.43.3.345
published in Journal of Marketing Research 43(3), 345-354 (SAGE Publishing)
openalex publication_date 2006/07/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
Abstract
The authors examine the effect of consumer reviews on relative sales of books at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com . The authors find that (1) reviews are overwhelmingly positive at both sites, but there are more reviews and longer reviews at Amazon.com ; (2) an improvement in a book's reviews leads to an increase in relative sales at that site; (3) for most samples in the study, the impact of one-star reviews is greater than the impact of five-star reviews; and (4) evidence from review-length data suggests that customers read review text rather than relying only on summary statistics.
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