When do consumers buy online product reviews? Effects of review quality, product type, and reviewer’s photo

•Quality of online product reviews has significant influence on purchase intention.•For search good, review quality has positive indirect effect via product evaluation.•For experience good, review quality has both direct (−) and indirect (+) effects.•Review quality affects website evaluation only when reviewers’ photos are present. A web-based experiment (N=201) examined (a) how the quality of online product reviews affects the participants’ acceptance of the reviews as well as their evaluations of the sources and (b) how such effects vary depending on the product type and the availability of reviewers’ photos. For the product type, an experience good (computer game) whose quality is difficult to assess before firsthand experience and a search good (vitamin) whose quality can be easily evaluated by reading a product description were compared. After reading overall positive reviews, those exposed to the high-quality (vs. low-quality) reviews evaluated the product more positively, which in turn, led to a stronger purchase intention. However, review quality also had a negative direct effect on the purchase intention for the experience good, with no corresponding effect for the search good. High-quality reviews induced more positive evaluations of the reviewers (primary source), but they enhanced website evaluation (secondary source) only when the reviewers’ photos were present, suggesting that such visual cues may facilitate systematic message processing.