An Empirical Analysis Of Factors Influencing The Helpfulness Of Online Consumer Reviews

With the rapid development of Internet, e-commerce has been spreaded rapidly,and changed people’s consumption habits. More and more consumers choose totransfer resources as well as information, and share their product using experienceand advices through network platform. Online consumer productreviews (hereinafter referred to as online reviews) based on the internet areplaying an increasingly important role in the consumer’s purchase decision-makingprocess, and constantly changing consumers’ behavior as well as enterprises’profitability and development strategies.At present, domestic and international entrepreneurs and scholars have paidgreat attention to online reviews, and have launched a series of relevant theoryresearches and practice. They have made significant research results on how onlinereview helpfulness consumer percepted influences consumer behavior andbusiness sales. But it is not so sufficient for the researches on the main influencefactors of the helpfulness of online reviews. Most of them study the influence ofonline reviews’ own attributes on their helpfulness, and few scholars consideronline reviewers’ attributes. Meanwhile, they haven’t considered product types orjust take one kind of products as research object, when choosing product reviews.So that, part of their research conclusions don’t have general applicability.Therefore, this paper investigates the main factors influencing the helpfulnessof online reviews and the different influence between different product types fromboth reviewers’ and reviews’ attributes, taking product type as regulation variableof the model. Reviewers’ attributes include reputation credibility and experiencecredibility. Reviews’ attributes include online reviews’ extremity, depth, nature andemotional orientation. Product type includes two kinds: search goods andexperience goods. In this paper, we operationalize the variables of our model usingthe online consumer reviews through Amazon.com concerning two kinds of producttypes for eight brands, and then make correlation analysis and multiple linearregression analysis with the use of statistical software SPSS15.0. Throughhypothesis testing, we find that both reviewers’ and reviews’ attributes havesignificant influence on the online review helpfulness, and have significantdifference between search and experience goods. Reviewers’ reputation credibility and experience credibility have significant positive influence on online reviewhelpfulness, and it is more evident in experience products; Online reviews’extremity has significant impact on the helpfulness, extreme positive or negativereviews are more useful in experience goods, both the extreme and neutral reviewshave the same usefulness; Depth has significant positive influence on onlinereviews’ helpfulness, and it is more evident in search goods; Text’s nature also hassignificant influence on online reviews’ helpfulness, subjective reviews are moreuseful in experience goods, objective reviews are more useful in search goods;Further more, text’s emotional orientation has significant influence on onlinereview helpfulness, negative ones are more useful, but the positive effect ofnegative reviews is reduced in experience goods.The main conclusions of this paper, not only have important theoreticalcontributions in the field of e-commerce and word-of-mouth marketing, but alsohave important practical guiding significance for the companies’ management ofonline reviews and marketing activities.