User-Generated Ratings and the Evaluation of Credibility and Product Quality in Ecommerce Transactions

Although extremely popular, electronic commerce transactions often lack information that has traditionally served to ensure trust and credibility among exchange partners. The capacity of digital media to aggregate information and connect individuals to one another, however, offers new potential for determining information quality and credibility. To understand people´s perceptions of the credibility of commercial web site information and the factors they find important in their evaluative processes, a nationally representative survey and quasi-experiment were conducted. Survey results showed that while people engage in ecommerce regularly, they do not contribute consumer-generated information very often. They do, however, rely heavily on ratings to evaluate the credibility of commercial information they find online Experimental results further indicate that people attend to aggregate product ratings, but not to the number of ratings when evaluating the quality of products sold online. We conclude with implications of these findings for system designers.