Conceptualising a formative model for online review helpfulness: Proposal
Online product reviews (reviews) play an important role in the consumer's purchase decision, which affects sales and assists business firms in improving quality (by receiving feedback). The number of reviews available, even for a product that has mediocre popularity, can reach a few hundred or a thousand. In order to get the most informative review to the customers first, from the plethora of reviews available online, online retailers came up with the 'helpfulness voting' feature. This became a major hit and now almost all websites, as well as academics, search for the most helpful review, according to the number of consumer votes that a review has received. Previous research has acknowledged the importance of 'review helpfulness'. Review helpfulness has been conceptualised and evaluated by researchers, as well as websites, according to their requirements. In this study, we have tried to inspect the evaluation of the review helpfulness construct in the extant literature and have proposed a conceptual framework of a formative index as the measurement instrument of review helpfulness.