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Consumer opinions or experience on products that are shared with other prospective buyers in the form of customer reviews on e-commerce sites is used as a source of information that consumers access instantly and regularly (Wang et al., 2018). Customer reviews play a significant role in making an online purchasing decision (Wang et al., 2018). The consumer-generated review serves two functionalities (Park et al., 2007). The first one is to help e-shoppers to evaluate products and services before making a purchasing decision (Wan & Nakayama, 2014). The second is it helps the consumers to get familiar with the products or services before they make the purchase. Consumers can accumulate information about the product even though they don’t have the intention of buying it right away (Chen & Xie, 2008).
Researchers have found that firms’ sales can be influenced by customer reviews (Chen & Xie, 2008; Ghose & Ipeirotis, 2006; Guo et al., 2017). Customer reviews with post-purchase information are believed to be more helpful than company-generated information (Bickart & Schindler, 2001). Nowadays, consumers believe other consumers’ judgment more than firm-generated ads. This is because sellers tend to hide information that may harm their revenue and just highlight the good aspects on the other hand consumers provide genuine feedback on the products. Moreover, company created content are more standardized and mostly written in an objective manner, whereas consumer-created content in other word customer reviews can be subjective or objective where they can express their emotion, strength or weakness of the products (Chen & Xie, 2004). Also, out of 10 respondents 9 of them either “completely” or “somewhat” trusted peer recommendations. Trust factors among other potential customer reviews online are higher than market-generated content (Flanagin & Metzger, 2013). In present-day practice, most of the online retail platforms show review star rating and the number of votes, which indicated the review’s helpfulness. Even though this helpfulness voting gives some understanding about the usefulness of the review, however, perceive value of every individual might be a subjective matter and may value them differently (Ham et al., 2019). An online review can be considered valuable when it has been rated by the reader as worthy and enjoying (Park & Nicolau, 2015). Perceive value of the same product can be expressed differently as the viewpoint of each individual is different (Eisenhardt & Zbaracki, 1992; Robey & Taggart, 1982). Therefore, perceived value can be distinguished as hedonic review and utilitarian review. Realizing these facts, companies encourage consumers to write and share their experience towards products on their e-commerce sites as a review (Mayzlin, 2006; Cantallops & Salvi, 2014). For example, online travel agencies like Expedia and Agoda actively look for consumers’ opinions by sending a reminder email to post reviews to those who already used their service but do not post reviews. Interestingly, Amazon, one of the top e-tailers, eliminated its major spending for television and general printing advertising. Instead, the company turned to customer reviews. Amazon offers not only editorial reviews but also customer reviews or opinions from the customers who already bought that book and provided their star rating (Thompson, 2003). Several empirical studies done in the last decade stated the importance and influence of helpful reviews on commodities (Zhu & Zhang, 2010), new products as well as services (Ye et al., 2011). Chen and Xie (2008) mentioned that helpfulness votes on review positively influence sales.