The Influence of Multidimensional User Reviews on Consumer Purchase Decisions on Shopee

Abstract

With the rapid expansion of Thailand’s digital economy and mobile e-commerce, the Shopee platform has established a dominant position in the local market. In an online shopping environment characterized by information asymmetry, consumer behavior is shifting from a purely price-oriented paradigm to a trust-driven, value-oriented approach, positioning online user reviews as a core reference for purchase decisions. To empirically analyze the specific paths through which online reviews influence consumer purchase decisions, this study aimed to examine the mechanisms of four review dimension: review quantity, review valence, review emotional content, and review recency, on Shopee users’ purchase decisions, thereby constructing an integrated information processing framework.
Employing a quantitative research design, this study targeted active Shopee users in Bangkok, Thailand, as the research population, distributing a structured online questionnaire via convenience and snowball sampling to gather responses. The findings confirmed that consumers in mobile shopping contexts prioritize valence and recency as low-cognitive-load heuristic cues for rapid screening.
This study concludes that multidimensional online reviews significantly drive Shopee consumers’ purchase decisions, with heuristic cues playing a dominant role. Accordingly, it is recommended that the Shopee platform optimize its ranking algorithm to prioritize recent, high-scoring feedback and incorporate AI to extract semantic tags; concurrently, merchants should reinforce pre-shipping quality control and establish normalized review incentive mechanisms to maintain review recency.

Keywords: online user reviews, purchase decisions, e-commerce, consumer behavior