The Effects of Featuring Product Sampling Reviews on E-Tailer Websites

Given the significant influence of online product reviews on consumer purchases, firms are trying to be more proactive in leveraging the influence of reviews. One way of doing this is to offer free product samples to consumers to incentivize product reviews, displaying them along with a disclosure in the existing pool of organic reviews in the hopes of stimulating sales. However, it is not clear whether such product sampling reviews are indeed beneficial to sales, considering that they may have a nontrivial influence on the generation of organic reviews. Based on data from a leading e-commerce platform in China, we found that sponsored product sampling reviews promoted product sales but also reduced the volume of organic reviews for the targeted product. However, the net effect on sales remained positive, suggesting that e-tailers may wish to utilize sponsored product sampling reviews. We also conducted a scenario-based experiment to reveal how the nature of product sampling reviews affects consumers’ brand quality and fairness perceptions. Based on our findings we offer future research directions to improve the understanding of how to better harness the power of sponsored reviews.