A Study of Purchase Influence and Behavioral Intention on the Adoption of Electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM) Systems

This study investigates how relevant factors representing the central and peripheral routes affect Chinese consumer adoption of eWOM system. This study is the first to propose a model linking argument quality, site quality and reviewer quality with purchase influence and behavior intention and show how these two factors affect the usage and the adoption of eWOM. Complementing the predicted intention-adoption link, data analysis based on 136 samples after controlling gender, age and occupation status shows that the purchase influence-adoption link has a stronger predictability than the behavioral intention-adoption link. The results show that site quality, reviewer quality and argument quality all positively affect behavioral intention while argument quality and site quality affects purchase influence. The findings demonstrate the importance of purchase influence and its antecedents in the context of predicting eWOM adoption and they carry important practical implications helping organizations and system designer to implement a more effective online review system.