On the Helpfulness of Product Reviews - An Analysis of Customer-to-Customer Trust on eShop-Platforms

In the last decade the market share of online stores in the retail sector has risen constantly and partly replaced traditional face-to-face shops in cities and shopping malls. One reason is that the cost structure of online shops is lower than of classic shops since the latter have to finance physical stores and sales personnel. On the one hand, this often leads to a strategic cost advantage and results lower selling prices. On the other hand, online stores normally do not provide personal consulting services as in traditionally face-to-face shops. However, online shops have established different forms of product consulting to compensate the missing personal advice of the sales persons in a physical shop examples are product related hotlines or online chatrooms. An even cheaper possibility is to establish a recommendation system where previous buyers are invited to write reviews on a product. Some eShops even provide some kind of cascading system: a product review written by a customer can be classified as helpful or not by other customers. In our research we focus on this second cascade. The objective of our paper is to analyze if there are structures or rules that make product reviews written by customers helpful for other customers.

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