The effects of customer online reviews on sales performance: The role of mobile phone's quality characteristics

Quality characteristics have been increasingly emphasized by companies to attract more customers. Previous literature has pointed out the importance of measuring customer's attitude towards quality characteristics. In addition, the quality characteristics' classification needs to be improved. Also, few studies have examined the impact of products' different quality characteristics on sales rank. This paper measures customers' satisfaction in online reviews based on a sentimental lexicon. The mobile phones' quality characteristics are classified into five categories based on Kano model. The impact of these categories on sales performance is shown by using Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) model. Our sample is four mobile phone brands' sales information and customer review data on Amazon websites. Our study extracts quality characteristics and transforms each review into a structured vector. LSTM's weights are adopted to map quality characteristics into Kano model's categories. The regression results show that the Excitement and Performance quality characteristics can significantly enhance product's popularity. We also find that the Indifferent and Reverse quality characteristics can't have a significant influence on these products. This study also highlights that the Must quality characteristics are essential but can't continuously improve product's sales performance. Our findings suggest that products' quality characteristics may have a disparate influence on purchase decision. It also enlightens managers to pay more attention to important quality characteristics.