Importance of Online Product Reviews from a Consumer's Perspective

Product reviews and ratings are popular tools to support buying decisions of consumers. These tools are also valuable for online retailers, who use rating systems in order to build trust and reputation in the online market. Many online shops offer quantitative ratings, textual reviews or a combination of both. This paper examines the acceptance and usage of ratings and reviews in the context of e-commerce transactions. A survey among 104 German online shoppers was conducted to examine how consumer reviews and rat- ings are used to support buying decisions. The survey shows that reviews and ratings are an important source of information for consumers. However, qualitative feedback from the survey indicates that the perceived helpfulness of rating systems varies. Especially the comparison of user reviews is a very time consuming process for the customer, because of the unstructured nature of textual user reviews. In this paper we summarize similar problems and show corresponding examples to them. This will give new insight for future research in the area of user ratings and reviews.