With the booming popularity of social media such as facebook and Wechat, more and more people and firms commence to utilize it to promote products and services. The convenience of sharing personal experience online, however, also leads to increasing number of consumer to complain through online reiews. For example, negative online review has increased 800% over the years between 2014 and 2015 (Causon 2015) and has negative impact on many viewers’ buying decisions (Chevalier, & Mayzlin, 2006). Therefore, it is important to investigate what factors would reduce the negative impact of other customers’ online complaints on consumer purchase intention. Developing friendships with customers through social media is a common strategy for service provider to retain customers. Prior literature suggests that consumers in general are more tolerant of a service failure when the service provider is having a friendship with the customer than when the provider is having a business relationship (Wan, Hui, and Wyer 2011). Therefore, we suggest that friendship could also attenuate the negative impact of an online complaint from other customer on consumer purchase intention. Furthermore, we predict that this could happen only in the self-consumption situation. In the consumption situation of buying gifts for others, friendship would no longer attenuate the impact of a negative online review on consumer purchase intention. It is because gift giving involves sybolic value of face enhancement in developing social relationships with the gift giving target. Consumers would be less likely to take risks of buying substandard products as gifts. Implications and future research directions will be discussed.

• Abigail X. Luo(The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China)
• Lisa, C. Wan(The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China)