Online Product Descriptions – Boost for your Sales?

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 retailer or manufacturer provided information, 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\u27s sales. The number of customer reviews available for a product also moderates the effect of the information amount of a product description on sales