Abstract

Consumer reviews on retailer-hosted platforms present an internal source of information for customers before considering the purchase of a product. While related literature has established a strong link between review ratings and retailer sales, research that integrates external sources is still in its infancy. This is particularly true for the role of social media, in which user actions can induce other users to behave in a similar way. This paper thus examines the role of social media in the assessment of product reviews on retailer-hosted platforms. We find that a higher deviation of a review rating from a product’s social media popularity has a positive effect on the perceived helpfulness of the review. Moreover, we see that negative reviews are more likely to receive a helpful vote if the product enjoys substantial popularity on social media, whereas we observe the opposite effect for products with low popularity.

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