Investigation on the Impact of eWOM on Social Media towards the Purchase Intention of Consumers in Retail Industry in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Sri Lankan retail industry is in a very competitive stage. Most of the retailers are using the social media as their main marketing and communication system. This research main aim is to investigate the impact of eWOM (electronic word of mouth) towards the purchase intention of the Sri Lankan consumers. When the consumers are reading online posts and feedbacks to purchase the retail products in Sri Lanka, the eWOM became one of very important factor the present research examined 4 main factors to find out the impact of eWOM towards the purchase intention. The main factors are credibility, trustworthy, informative and message relevance. This is a descriptive research and quantitative data collected method was applied to obtain the fresh data from respondents.

Data were collected using both primary and secondary data. The questionnaire based survey sent to 250 respondents which covered western and southern provinces of Sri Lanka. The research used spss (social sciences statistical package) for the analyzing the data.

There are different types of analyses were used in this present research. Those are descriptive analysis, factor analysis, and regression analysis. The research outcome of this research gave very interesting findings. The credibility, trustworthy, informative and message relevance have and positive significant influence towards the purchase intention of Sri Lankan consumers.  The "sig” p value was less than 0.05 such as 0.000 of credibility, trustworthy, message relevance and informative factors. This research have find out how the eWOM can be impacted towards the purchase intention with the above findings.