Online customer reviews are crucial to inform customers’ online purchase decisions. However, the complex nature and immense volume of customer reviews can easily overload customers’ cognitive resources, with significant negative consequences for customers and online shopping sites. In response, first online shopping sites provide summaries of textual review content (i.e., customer review summaries) alongside individual customer reviews. Building on cognitive load theory, this study examines how customer review summaries in textual and visual presentation formats affect customers’ cognitive load during online purchase decisions. With an incentive-compatible online experiment, we find that displaying customer review summaries reduces cognitive load. While textual and visual review summaries are equally effective, displaying both textual and visual review summaries reduces cognitive load the most. These findings contribute to literature on the design of customer review systems and provide relevant insights for practitioners on how to support customers’ online purchase decisions.

Social media (SM) changed the communication between SM managers, who manage an organization’s SM account and users (representing (potential) customers). While research offers affordance systems that focus on various roles, e.g., employees or politically active users, the important linking pin of both worlds, the SM manager, has so far not been systematically linked to this affordance perspective. The purpose of this study is to extend research by investigating how SM managers utilize the SM affordances visibility, editability, persistence and association (EVAP) when enacting their SM activities with customers. Based on research and in-depth interviews with SM managers from 14 different organizations in Germany, findings show that they mostly focused on managing visibility and association and less on editability and persistence. Further, sub-affordances were identified that mostly expressed that SM managers rather look forward in a planning manner than backwards on their post history.