Research On The Helpfulness Of Online Review With The Moderation Of Reviewers’ Quality And Product Type

With the rapid development of e-commerce, online product reviews’ has been wellrecognized by online consumers and retailers and scholars. Research on reviewhelpfulness has become a promising research topic. Online product reviews mainlyinclude review rating, review content, and sentiment and properties. In addition, moreand more research work has been focusing on the influence of product type andreviewers’ quality, and obtaining many interesting results.Based on a through literatures review, two dimensions of review rating and reviewdepth have been extracted in term of online product reviews attributes, and the deviationof review rating are creatively defined and discussed in our study. At the same time twodimensions of product type and reviewers’ quality are introduced as the moderators.Then, we have explored the influence of online review to review helpfulness under themoderation of different types of goods and different reviewers who have differentquality. Two attributes have been extracted mainly from the reviewers’ qualitydimension, such as reviewers’ ranking and their helpfulness rate. For the product typedimension, our research is mainly based on the Nelson’s classification, which definedthe search goods and experience goods.The sample data are collected from the Amazon.com website, including sixspecific products among two types. Data standardization, correlation analysis andregression analysis and significant test are completed by using the Stata10.0statisticalsoftware.The results shows that review rating, deviation of rating and review depth haveinfluence on review helpfulness respectively. Product type moderates the influence ofreview rating, review depth on the review helpfulness. Specifically, for experiencegoods, review rating and depth have more significant influence than search goods.Reviewers’ quality also has the moderation effect, for instance, higher quality reviewersmake more helpful reviews.