• Journal of Information Technology Services
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.21-32
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• 2017

This study analyzes the variable consumer characteristics that influence the intention to use online product reviews. In online e-commerce, where purchases take place without consumers seeing the products in person, the product reviews left by other consumers who have already purchased the product are believed to be valuable information. However, when different consumers read the same product review, their responses to it may vary. This study analyzes the characteristics of consumers who utilize product reviews for their purchases. Consumer characteristics are categorized into personal information, personality, purchasing tendency, and experience related to product reviews. These factors are examined to see if they have direct or indirect effects on a consumer's intention to use product reviews when making online purchases. We surveyed a total of 240 consumers who had experience using e-commerce and knew about online product reviews. Once the data was collected, path analysis was conducted using the statistics tool AMOS. The study results reveal that consumers who are female, extroverted, and have higher price sensitivity think that product reviews left by others are useful, and that this "perceived usefulness" has a positive effect on the intention to use product reviews for making online purchasing decisions. In addition, consumers who are agreeable to others, have high brand sensitivity, and who have left numerous reviews themselves demonstrated the tendency to trust reviews left by others more. Thus, we conclude that this "perceived reliability" makes it more likely that a consumer will use product reviews when making online purchasing decisions. Future research can be done to develop this study further by analyzing whether providing online product reviews corresponding to the personal characteristics of consumers enhances the effect of product reviews on online purchasing decisions.

• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.31 no.2
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• pp.159-177
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• 2022

Purpose Online reviews are critical for sales of online shopping platforms because they provide useful information to consumers. As the eCommerce market grows rapidly, the role of online reviews is becoming more important. The purpose of this study is to analyze how online reviews written by domestic consumers affect product sales by classifying the types of products. Design/methodology/approach This study analyzed how the effects of review characteristics(reviewer reputation, reviewer exposure, review length, time, rating, image, and emotional score) on the usefulness of online reviews differ depending on the product types. Subsequently, how the impact of review attributes (review usefulness, number of reviews, ratings, and emotional scores) on product sales differs according to each product type was compared. Based on the FCB Grid model, the product type was classified into high involvement-rational, high involvement-emotional, low involvement -rational, and low involvement-emotional product types. Findings According to the analysis result, the characteristics of reviews useful to consumers were different for each product type, and the review attributes affecting product sales were also different for each product type. This study confirmed that it revealed that product characteristics are major consideration in evaluating the review usefulness and the factors affecting product sales.

• Fashion, Industry and Education
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.19-35
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• 2018

This study explores the effect of information direction and order of cosmetics power bloggers on consumer responses. A total of 488 undergraduate students participated in experiments with mock-up stimuli of sunscreen product reviews by power bloggers. The study was conducted with four stimuli of product review posts (i.e., positive reviews only, positive-negative reviews in order, negative-positive reviews in order, negative reviews only) of the power bloggers. The results showed a significant difference in consumer responses according to information direction and order of product reviews of the power bloggers. Specifically, negative reviews were considered more objective and more useful than positive reviews were. However, positivity of reviews is crucial in generating more positive attitudes toward products, greater purchase intention, and greater word-of-mouth intention. In regard to information order, the negative-positive reviews generated more positive attitudes toward the product and greater purchase intention than did the positive-negative reviews, emphasizing the importance of ending product reviews with positive information so as to create positive responses. Referring to the findings, power bloggers and marketers using bloggers as a promotional tool would benefit by carefully designing information content in consideration of an appropriate direction and order of information to better fit their purpose.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.29-44
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• 2017

In Internet commerce, consumers are heavily influenced by product reviews written by other users who have already purchased the product. However, as the product reviews accumulate, it takes a lot of time and effort for consumers to individually check the massive number of product reviews. Moreover, product reviews that are written carelessly actually inconvenience consumers. Thus many online vendors provide mechanisms to identify reviews that customers perceive as most helpful (Cao et al. 2011; Mudambi and Schuff 2010). For example, some online retailers, such as Amazon.com and TripAdvisor, allow users to rate the helpfulness of each review, and use this feedback information to rank and re-order them. However, many reviews have only a few feedbacks or no feedback at all, thus making it hard to identify their helpfulness. Also, it takes time to accumulate feedbacks, thus the newly authored reviews do not have enough ones. For example, only 20% of the reviews in Amazon Review Dataset (Mcauley and Leskovec, 2013) have more than 5 reviews (Yan et al, 2014). The purpose of this study is to analyze the factors affecting the usefulness of online product reviews and to derive a forecasting model that selectively provides product reviews that can be helpful to consumers. In order to do this, we extracted the various linguistic, psychological, and perceptual elements included in product reviews by using text-mining techniques and identifying the determinants among these elements that affect the usability of product reviews. In particular, considering that the characteristics of the product reviews and determinants of usability for apparel products (which are experiential products) and electronic products (which are search goods) can differ, the characteristics of the product reviews were compared within each product group and the determinants were established for each. This study used 7,498 apparel product reviews and 106,962 electronic product reviews from Amazon.com. In order to understand a review text, we first extract linguistic and psychological characteristics from review texts such as a word count, the level of emotional tone and analytical thinking embedded in review text using widely adopted text analysis software LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count). After then, we explore the descriptive statistics of review text for each category and statistically compare their differences using t-test. Lastly, we regression analysis using the data mining software RapidMiner to find out determinant factors. As a result of comparing and analyzing product review characteristics of electronic products and apparel products, it was found that reviewers used more words as well as longer sentences when writing product reviews for electronic products. As for the content characteristics of the product reviews, it was found that these reviews included many analytic words, carried more clout, and related to the cognitive processes (CogProc) more so than the apparel product reviews, in addition to including many words expressing negative emotions (NegEmo). On the other hand, the apparel product reviews included more personal, authentic, positive emotions (PosEmo) and perceptual processes (Percept) compared to the electronic product reviews. Next, we analyzed the determinants toward the usefulness of the product reviews between the two product groups. As a result, it was found that product reviews with high product ratings from reviewers in both product groups that were perceived as being useful contained a larger number of total words, many expressions involving perceptual processes, and fewer negative emotions. In addition, apparel product reviews with a large number of comparative expressions, a low expertise index, and concise content with fewer words in each sentence were perceived to be useful. In the case of electronic product reviews, those that were analytical with a high expertise index, along with containing many authentic expressions, cognitive processes, and positive emotions (PosEmo) were perceived to be useful. These findings are expected to help consumers effectively identify useful product reviews in the future.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.113-124
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• 2024

Purpose: This study is a quantitative study and analyzes the effect of evaluating the extreme and usefulness of product reviews on sales performance by using text mining techniques based on product review big data. We investigate whether the perceived helpfulness of product reviews serves as a mediating factor in the impact of product review extremity on sales performance. Research design, data and methodology: The analysis emphasizes customer interaction factors associated with both product review helpfulness and sales performance. Out of the 8.26 million Amazon product reviews in the book category collected by He & McAuley (2016), text mining using natural language processing methodology was performed on 300,000 product reviews, and the hypothesis was verified through hierarchical regression analysis. Results: The extremity of product reviews exhibited a negative impact on the evaluation of helpfulness. And the helpfulness played a mediating role between the extremity of product reviews and sales performance. Conclusion: Increased inclusion of extreme content in the product review's text correlates with a diminished evaluation of helpfulness. The evaluation of helpfulness exerts a negative mediating effect on sales performance. This study offers empirical insights for digital market distributors and sellers, contributing to the research field related to product reviews based on review ratings.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.67-90
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• 2008

Prior to making choices among online products and services, consumers often search online product reviews written by other consumers. Online product reviews have great influences on consumer behavior because they are believed to be more reliable than information provided by sellers. However, ever-increasing lists of product reviews make it difficult for consumers to find the right information efficiently. A customized search mechanism is a method to provide personalized information which fits the user's requirements. This study examines effects of a customized search mechanism and perceived similarity between consumers and product reviewers on consumer behaviors. More specifically, we address the following research questions: (1) Can a customized search mechanism increase perceived similarity between product review authors and readers? (2) Are product reviews perceived as more credible when product reviews were written by the authors perceived similar to them? (3) Does credibility of product reviews have a positive impact on acceptance of product reviews? (4) Does acceptance of product reviews have an influence on purchase intention of the readers? To examine these research questions, a lab experiment with a between-subject factor (whether a customized search mechanism is provided or not) design was employed. In order to enhance mundane realism and increase generalizability of the findings, the experiment sites were built based on a real online store, cherrya.com (http://www.cherrya.com/). Sixty participants were drawn from a pool that consisted of undergraduate and graduate students in a large university. Participation was voluntary; all the participants received 5,000 won to encourage their motivation and involvement in the experiment tasks. In addition, 15 participants, who selected by a random draw, received 30,000 won to actually purchase the product that he or she decided to buy during the experiment. Of the 60 participants, 25 were male and 35 were female. In examining the homogeneity between the two groups, the results of t-tests revealed no significant difference in gender, age, academic years, online shopping experience, and Internet usage. To test our research model, we completed tests of the measurement models and the structural models using PLS Graph version 3.00. The analysis confirmed individual item reliability, internal consistency, and discriminant validity of measurements. The results show that participants feel more credible when product reviews were written by the authors perceived similar to them, credibility of product reviews have a positive impact on acceptance of product reviews, and acceptance of product reviews have an influence on purchase intention of the readers. However, a customized search mechanism did not increase perceived similarity between product review authors and readers. The results imply that there is an urgent need to develop a better customized search tool in order to increase perceived similarity between product review authors and readers.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.121-128
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• 2015

A given product's online product reviews build up to form largely positive or negative reviews or mixed reviews that include both the positive and negative reviews. While the homogeneously positive or negative reviews help readers identify the generally praised or criticized product, the mixed reviews with minority opinions potentially contain valuable information about the product. We present a method of retrieving minority opinions from the online product reviews using the skewness of positive/negative reviews. The proposed method first classifies the positive/negative product reviews using a sentiment dictionary and then calculates the skewness of the classified results to identify minority reviews. Minority review retrieval experiments were conducted on smartphone and movie reviews, and the F1-measures were 24.6% (smartphone) and 15.9% (movie) and the accuracies were 56.8% and 46.8% when the individual reviews' sentiment classification accuracies were 85.3% and 78.8%. The theoretical performance of minority review retrieval is also discussed.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2014.05a
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• pp.79-81
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• 2014

People increasingly rely on sources of information from E-commerce reviews. Product reviews is an important determinant of potential customers' buying choices. They are also utilized by product manufacturers to find problems of their products and to collect competitive intelligence information about their competitors. Unfortunately, it is well-known that many online product reviews are not made by genuine costumers of products. Reviewers could write some undeserving positive reviews to promote or fake negative reviews to defame some certain product, and we call them fake product reviews. Fake product review detection makes an attempt to detect fake reviews and removes them to restore the truthful ones for readers. To the best of our knowledge, there is still less published study on this problem. In this paper, we make a survey and an attempt to give a brief overview on fake product review detection. The related work of fake product review detection is presented including web spam and spam email. Then some methods to detect fake reviews are introduced and summarized. The trend of fake product review detection is concluded finally.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.9 no.5
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• pp.1702-1716
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• 2015

Customer product reviews have become great influencers of purchase decision making. To assist potential customers, online stores provide various ways to sort customer reviews. Different methods have been developed to identify and recommend useful reviews to customers, primarily using feedback provided by customers about the helpfulness of reviews. Most of the methods consider the preferences of all users to determine whether reviews are helpful, and all users receive the same recommendations.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.13 no.12
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• pp.6097-6120
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• 2019

Online consumer reviews (OCRs) provide product information and recommendations especially pictures in reviews depict the true information about the product. This study investigates the influence of pictured reviews on online seller (for a particular product of a seller) rating with moderating effect of price, brand type (foreign vs local), goods type (experience vs search), and brand familiarity. Multiple robust linear regression analysis with moderation interaction and quadratic effect used to explain the relationship of the explanatory variables with the criterion variable. We collected cross-sectional data from the two most renowned Chinese online shopping platforms (B2C) of total 15,621 product links. Results show that higher number of reviews with a low ratio of picture reviews response negative effect on rating, whereas the lower number of reviews with a high ratio of picture reviews response positive effect on the rating. In overall picture in the reviews improve the online seller product rating. For the moderation effect, results show that price and brand familiarity have a positive interaction effect on the relation of pictured reviews and rating whereas experience goods have less negative effect comparing search goods. Finally, local brand has less negative interaction effect comparing foreign brand to pictured reviews and rating.