Effectiveness of Online Consumer Product Review: The Role of Experiential Information

Product reviews as consumer-generated information have drawn great attention from researchers and practitioners. A substantial academic effort has been made to comprehend factors influencing the helpfulness of reviews, largely centering on a few quantitative factors (e.g., star rating, review length). However, research investigating qualitative aspects of product reviews still lags, though product reviews consist mainly of peer consumers’ experiences and opinions. In this study, we use the smartphone reviews to investigate consumers’ experiences and opinions in relation to review helpfulness. By statistical analysis, we demonstrate that consumers’ experiential information plays a significant role to make product reviews helpful. We furnish additional evidence of the statistical results by predictive analytics. Our findings suggest that consumers’ experiential information conveys meaningful implication to better understand the nature of product reviews. Therefore, this study contributes to the extant literature of e-commerce and to practitioners to utilize the consumer reviews of their products