Response to online customer reviews helps increase sales. Extensive research has been carried out on this topic discussing tactics of response, while few scholars looked at it from the social network perspective. The problem is not how to respond but to whom to respond. Essentially, it is an effective online social network, not a response itself that generates trust and sales. In this paper, our main work is to use basic theoretical tools of social network theory to reveal the nature of the

more »

... tionship between online response and performance. We use a web crawler to scrape data and get a sample of 3379 sellers from a B2B website. The regression results are consistent with the theoretical derivation and provide strong evidence for our assumptions and hypothesis. Sellers' response to online customer reviews, especially to negative reviews, has a significant positive effect on its sales. Seller's product price and product heterogeneity play moderating roles in the relationship above. Therefore, sellers should actively participate in online social conversations and get embedded in online social networks. Sellers should see pricing and product diversification strategies as important factors in the networking process. E-commerce platform companies should provide the necessary technical support to accelerate the formation of online communities. Producers should cooperate more with sellers and make full use of the customer review information for product improvement and innovation.