IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jouret/v100y2024i1p5-23.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The effect of review images on review helpfulness: A contingency approach

Author

Listed:
  • Kübler, Raoul V.
  • Lobschat, Lara
  • Welke, Lina
  • van der Meij, Hugo

Abstract

Online retailing is still dominated by information asymmetries, as it often remains difficult for consumers to fully judge the quality of a product online. Reviews written by customers help to reduce this asymmetry. Helpful reviews have thus become an important tool to drive online sales. Beside textual information, reviews nowadays also often include images that can further help consumers to better judge products or services. While online retailers need to invest substantial resources in hosting and incentivizing review images, it remains unclear under which conditions review images drive (or reduce) review helpfulness and how review image content affects review helpfulness. We rely on a set of more than 97,000 reviews from Amazon to investigate the contingencies under which review images increase review helpfulness. Furthermore, we rely on more than 6,000 images in our data set to explore how review image content (i.e., image focus and context fit) drives review helpfulness. Our results show that online retailers should especially motivate consumers to include images in a review when the overall rating is extremely positive, when the reviewer has a high reputation, and when the review addresses a hedonic or experience product. Our image content analysis further shows that images help to increase helpfulness when they show the product in application. This effect is especially strong in the case of longer reviews.

Suggested Citation

  • Kübler, Raoul V. & Lobschat, Lara & Welke, Lina & van der Meij, Hugo, 2024. "The effect of review images on review helpfulness: A contingency approach," Journal of Retailing, Elsevier, vol. 100(1), pages 5-23.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jouret:v:100:y:2024:i:1:p:5-23
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jretai.2023.09.001
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022435923000386
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.jretai.2023.09.001?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:jouret:v:100:y:2024:i:1:p:5-23. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-retailing .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.