关键词: 在线评论有用性, 品牌声誉, 产品类型, 调节效应

Abstract: With the popularity of mobile internet, online market has developed rapidly in China, and a large number of online reviews have been generated at the same time. Online reviews break the restrictions of time and place and provide consumers with a great deal of information. At present, online reviews have become an important factor affecting consumption decisions. However, too much information can increase the cost of consumer collection, so it is important to identify useful online comment. The usefulness of online reviews refers to the usefulness of online reviews to purchase decisions. Almost all online shopping platforms have a review evaluation system, so that consumers can give priority to the information with higher evaluation.
According to the existing research, the number of reviews, the depth of reviews, the valence of reviews and additional reviews are important factors affecting the usefulness of online reviews. In addition, brand reputation and product type have a significant impact on consumer decision-making and the usefulness of online reviews. Brand reputation is the comprehensive evaluation and overall perception of a brand. A good brand reputation can make consumers associate with good product quality, so as to reduce the purchase risk and enhance the confidence. Based on the ability of consumers to obtain product information, products are divided into search products and experience products. Search products refer to the fact that consumers can collect information through different channels. When enough information is collected, they can more accurately know the characteristics of products, such as mobile phones. Such products tend to have uniform measurement standards, and a wide range of information can be collected to get a clear picture of product performance. As there is no unified objective evaluation standard for experience products, it is not possible to fully understand the product characteristics only through information search, such as sports shoes, so it must be through personal experience. Therefore, when studying the impact of the number, depth, price and additional comments on the usefulness of online reviews, we should consider the moderating effect of brand reputation and product type to clarify the internal mechanism.
In addition, most of the existing studies use questionnaires to obtain data, with a limited number of samples and are away from the actual purchasing environment, which may not reflect the real evaluation. In recent years, the use of natural data from real online shopping platforms to conduct review usefulness research began to rise. However, from the existing research, there are still few relevant studies, and the conclusions are inconsistent, so further research is needed.
Based on the review data of 24 brands in Jingdong Online mall over a period of one month, a panel regression model is constructed to study the effects of the number of reviews, depth of reviews, the valence of reviews and additional reviews on the usefulness of online reviews, and to test the moderating effects of brand reputation and product type. In this study, mobile phones are selected as search products and sports shoes as experience products. There are 12 mobile phone brands such as Apple, Samsung and VIVO, and 12 sneaker brands such as Nike, Converse and Anta. Octopus software is used to collect customer reviews of these 24 brands from September 21 to October 20, 2020 on Jingdong Online mall. A total of 44341 reviews is collected. After sorting, panel data of these 24 brands for 30 days are obtained. Next, through the regression analysis of the above panel data, the influencing factors and boundary conditions of the usefulness of online reviews are discussed.
The empirical results show that the number of reviews and additional reviews are positive, the valence of reviews is negative, and the reviews depth has no effect on the usefulness of online reviews. Brand reputation moderates the relationship between the number of reviews, additional reviews and the valence of reviews on the usefulness of online reviews. Compared with high brand reputation products, low brand reputation products are the most significant of the above three relationships. Product type moderates the effects of the number of reviews, additional reviews and the valence of reviews on the usefulness of reviews. Compared with experience products, search products are the most significant of the above three effects.
Due to the limitation of research conditions, there are some deficiencies in this research. Because different websites have different online review methods and evaluation systems, this paper only selects the data of Jingdong Online mall for research. In the future, we can consider expanding the sample size to different platforms for further research. This paper examines the moderating effects of brand reputation and product type, but there may be other moderating variables that can be further explored in the future.

Key words: usefulness of online reviews, brand reputation, product type, moderation effect