Article
Customer Similarities and Helpful Online Reviews.pdf
The Global Interdisciplinary Conference: Green & Digital Cities
(2019)
Abstract
Accompanying with the growth of Internet and e-commerce, online reviews have become an important source of information assisting consumers in making purchase decisions. Despite many studies in this area, there is no study of the helpfulness of the online reviews based on similarity of the consumers. Drawing upon the customer similarity concept, we develop a research model to explain how customer similarity affect the review helpfulness, which in turn helps the customers to make better purchase decisions. We use data from Amazon.com to test our model empirically. The results show that customer similarity moderates the effect of both review-and reviewer-related determinants on the review helpfulness in a way that reviews from a customer who is more similar to a new customer have been evaluated more helpful by the new customer. We also find that the moderating role of the customer similarity is stronger for the experience products. Our findings can help us in better understanding of the consumers' purchase behavior. Practitioners, especially online retailers, can also use findings of this study to provide their customers with more customized reviews having more value to them and helping them in making better purchase decisions.
Keywords
- Consumer Purchase Behavior,
- Online Review,
- Review Helpfulness,
- Customer Similarity
Disciplines
- Business,
- E-Commerce and
- Marketing
Publication Date
Summer June 1, 2019
Citation Information
Mohsen Ahmadian and Fatemeh Pouromran. "Customer Similarities and Helpful Online Reviews.pdf" The Global Interdisciplinary Conference: Green & Digital Cities (2019) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/mohsen-ahmadian/4/