Abstract:

Online product review on the shopping website is overload and its quality are uneven, so helping the consumer to find the useful reviews will contribute to their online shopping decision making. Based on the information adoption theory, we develop a model of factors affecting the reviews helpfulness and try to investigate how the review information content affects the review helpfulness. We use regression analysis to test the model by the reviews data of the cell phones crawled from the Aamzon.com. The result indicates that the factors affecting the perceived helpfulness of online product include the relevance, the objectivity and the timeliness of the review information. Furthermore, review information content has a positive relationship with the review helpfulness. Moderate reviews are more useful than extreme reviews, and newly posted reviews are more useful than old reviews. Whether the reviewer has bought product on the website or not has no relationship with the review helpfulness.

Key words: Review helpfulness, 　Information adoption, 　Online reviews, 　Review information content