The influence of recommendations and consumer reviews on evaluations of websites

Recommendations and consumer reviews are universally acknowledged as significant features of a business–to–consumer website. However, because of the well–documented obstacles to measuring the causal impact of these artifacts, there is still a lack of empirical evidence demonstrating their influence on two important outcome variables in the shopping context: perceived usefulness and social presence. To test the existence of a causal link between information technology (IT)–enabled support for the provision of recommendations and consumer reviews on the usefulness and social presence of the website, this study employs a novel approach to generate the experimental conditions by filtering the content of Amazon.com in real time. The results show that the provision of recommendations and consumer reviews increases both the usefulness and social presence of the website.