A Research On The Factors Of Online Reviews Helpfulness

In recent years, shopping online has become one of the dominant forms, during which the development of online comments is a burgeoning research area. Online comments could not only help consumers to make purchase decision, but also help the sellers to promote their goods. However, the number of comments grows exponentially due to the increasingly active of user review behavior. As a consequence, information overload, one of the universal problems in the era of information explosion, appears to be a serious problem in the online comments research, which needs to be solved urgently. Hence, rapid identification of helpful online comments is of great significance to both consumers and sellers. Herein, all kinds of influential factors have been investigated in this study based on previously reported works. In order to construct the influencing factor model of online review usefulness, information entropy theory and improved RFM-RFH model have been introduced. The influencing factors on online review usefulness were investigated on basis of characteristics of comments, characteristics of commentators, pubtime and amount of response, including star rating, text length, information content and characteristics of commentators, etc. In this study, online reviews data was fetched on the amazon website. In addition, the data of product involvement degree score was obtained through questionnaire. Regression analysis method was empolyed to analyze all the obtained data, by which not only the influencing factors on the usefulness of online reviews but also the regulating effect of product involvement degree on comment quality and commentator rankings were verified. The results demonstrated that the information content of comment could be measured by its corresponding entropy:the smaller the comment entropy is, the larger the amount of information and more useful of this comment will be; The value of reviewers could be reflected by the RFH score:the higher RFH scores indicated the more valuable of the reviewer and higher quality of comments; In addition, the helpfulness of online review could be influenced significantly by star rating, text length, information content and characteristics of reviewers, etc. Furthermore, the comment quality had much more significant influence on comment helpfulness of products with high involvement degree in comparation with products with high involvement degree, since consumers paid more attention to the information content when they purchased the products with high involvement degree.