Research On The Usefulness Of E-commerce Website Online Reviews

With the development of e-commerce and the improvement of the level oflogistics services, more and more people choose online shopping this fast andconvenient way to shop. To help customers better understand the product they want tobuy, improve customer satisfaction of online transactions. E-commerce sites havelaunched an online customer review system, by allowing consumers to make commentson the product they have bought, so that other consumers can get more informationabout the product besides goods description and expert commentary. Online reviews canreduce the information asymmetry between buyers and sellers, and this positive andeffective feedback mechanism can increase consumer confidence, thereby reducingconsumer·s perception of risk.However, with the growing number of comments, online reviews have alsoappeared the problem of information overload. When browsing online comments,consumers often faced with hundreds of comments, which will cost a lot of time. Inorder to convenient for consumer to use, improve customer satisfaction, e-commercewebsite should help consumers identify the valuable comments from all the reviews, tosave time for consumers. Therefore, study of which factors influence the usefulness ofonline reviews has a great effect on solving this problem.Currently, scholars have launching a lot of research about the usefulness of onlinereviews, but are mainly from the characteristic of review, reviewers and product types,not take account of the brand. As an important attribute of product,brand has a greateffect on customers· purchase intention. In the process of study the usefulness of onlinereviews can·t ignore the influence of brand. So, in this paper, the Amazon (China) sitewas selected for the study and five product review information was collected, empiricalresearch methods was used. Research review star, review depth and reviewer rank·seffect on the helpfulness of online reviews, as well as brand·s moderate effect on it. Theresult indicated that review depth and reviewer ranking have a positive effect on thehelpfulness of the review. Brand moderates the effect of review depth on the helpfulnessof the review. Besides, the effect of review extremity on the helpfulness of the reviewalso moderated by brand. For products with big brand, there is a Uμ relationshipbetween review extremity and the helpfulness of the review.