Conference Paper

Online Product Descriptions - Boost for your Sales?

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Abstract

Product descriptions are a source of information online consumers can use to reduce product uncertainty. Recent research provides evidence that consumers favor using information from other consumers, such as customer reviews, over information provided by the retailer or manufacturer, such as product descriptions. We complement this research and show that the presence of product descriptions significantly influences products’ sales and that this influence decreases with an increasing number of customer reviews. We furthermore demonstrate that a product description’s information amount positively affects a product’s sales. The number of customer reviews available for a product also moderates the effect of the information amount of a product description on sales.

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... Since all the necessary information is usually found on the label or on an information sheet attached to the product (the manufacturer takes care of these data), as already mentioned, companies often decide to build their own data catalogues, adapting them to their own needs and taking care of their quality on their own, improving the acquired data or creating them from scratch for the IT system. This fact is not surprising given that in e-Commerce, a unique marketing description of a product gives a noticeable competitive advantage ( [10] , [11]), hence the need to combine reliable information from the manufacturer with data created for the shop. ...
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