Exploring the impact of e-WOM on customer purchasing intention and co-creation of adults who use Taobao

The rise of multiple media channels has created numerous opportunities for electronic wordof-mouth communications, and an increasing number of customers prefer to use virtual communities, forums, and consumer review sites to share online shopping experiences with other users. Therefore, understanding the actual effects of electronic word-of-mouth communications on customer purchasing intention and value co-creation seems to be equally important for theoretical researchers and practical marketers. This research-based study seeks to explore the extent to which customer purchasing intention and co-creation behaviors would be affected by e-WOM quality, quantity and credibility on the Chinese most popular online shopping website Taobao. Also, the study investigates the influence of gender differences posed on purchase intention, trying to examine whether female customers and male customers would make different purchasing decisions on the Taobao platform. A quantitative method- web-based questionnaires were applied to approach frequent Taobao users in China, hypothesis testing and two-way ANOVA were implemented to analyze data. Major findings are consistent with previous studies on the interplay of e-WOM and purchase intention. However, this study contributes to the understanding of the role of e-WOM in several ways. The results show that the effect of e-WOM quality was the most prominent. Co-creation was found to be positively affected by e-WOM quality and credibility. More importantly, gender differences displayed no significant impacts on customer purchasing intention, but the mixed effect of gender and customers’ perception of online reviews had a positive influence on intent to purchase. The research has limitations on sample collection and the generalization of results, but future research directions are provided to extend this study