The effect of online reviews for food and beverage businesses on consumer confusion within the scope of e-commerce

Consumers generally do research from various sources about the product they will buy before purchasing. Internet platforms provide consumers with almost all kinds of information about the goods and services they are looking for through online comments. The existence of a large number and variety of similar products provides easy access to a large number of information about the products as a result of the developments in the internet and production technologies, it reveals consumer confusion, which varies in the form of similarity, ambiguity and overload confusion due to the mental and emotional difficulties of consumers in making decisions. In this study it is aimed to reveal the effect of online comments made on food and beverage businesses on consumer confusion at various online platforms. Within the framework of the relevant objective, the study consists of consumers who use online platforms throughout Turkey in the process of deciding which business to purchase services from, with the focus on food and beverage business. The data used in the scope of the study were obtained using the survey method from 468 consumers selected by the purposive sampling method from non-probability sampling methods. Within the scope of the research, SPSS 22 program was used for descriptive statistics, reliability analyses and explanatory factor analysis, AMOS 20 program was used for confirmatory factor analysis and path analysis (structural equation modeling). According to the results obtained, it was found that source credibility from online comment components has a significant effect on all dimensions of consumer confusion, while the findings show that perceived quantity of review from online comment components also significantly affects similarity and overload confusion.