Usefulness. Online Customer Reviews

There are many scholars who have studied the effect of online customer reviews. But they find conflicting conclusions among each other. Some show that it is the review volume which influences sales, and review valence doesn't do any help to the sales. But some others demonstrate that the later decides the sales. So we collect the data of sales and reviews about 196 books from the dangdang.com, and then use SPSS to analyze the relationship between reviews and sales and examine the existence of moderating effect and mediating effect in this paper, in order to explore how the review valence and volume do impact on sales. Besides this , because of the overload of online customer reviews and their unevenness quality, consumers can't evaluate the quality of what they want to buy, so it's very important to distinguish the most useful reviews and put them in the most obvious location. In this paper, we collect review data for two experience products and two search products from zhuoyue.com. We adopt a more comprehensive econometric model by adding two new variables of review resource to the existing model. And then we use the tobit regression to explore how the review information(review valence and review length ) and review source characteristic (review source disclosure and review source creditworthiness)influence the helpful of the review and how the product feature moderates the relation between review information and helpful. We get the following conclusions: (1)Review valence can do impact on sales. But the relation is fully mediated by the review volume for cheaper books. (2)The price and popularity of books can moderate the effect between review volume and sales. Review volume can do more impact on popular and expensive books than unpopular and cheap ones. (3) There is an U-shaped relationship between review valence and helpful for experience goods. (4)The review length influences the helpful of the review, and their effect is moderated by the product category. The relationship is stronger for search goods than experience ones. (5)The creditworthiness of the review resource can impact the helpful of the review. At last, on the base of above conclusions, we discuss the theory and practical significance of this paper. What we find in the paper can help us to better understand the usefulness of the online customer reviews, and improve the ability of the managers to apply them.