A new study has found that too many featured or top reviews can cause more confusion among customers. E-commerce sites like Flipkart, Amazon and many others use featured reviews to bring information and clarity to users. But using too many of these reviews can lead to less effective conversions. Published in the journal Management Information Systems Quarterly, the researchers suggested past a certain number of reviews that e-commerce should instead ask buyers of a product to select the best reviews instead.

"But when there are enough reviews, they may want to find a way to nudge the customers to decide on top reviews because that's going to be much more valuable than writing one more review,” explained co-author Wael Jabr, the assistant professor of supply chain and information systems in the Smeal College of Business, Pennsylvania State University.

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The researchers studied 2.2 million reviews and all review-related information like the number of reviews and featured reviews for 1,000 products on Amazon. The researchers then tracked the sentiment of reviews, based on the rating given by customers, and tracked the sales ranking of these products over a 10-month long period. The researchers found that for products with more than three featured reviews, the value of those featured reviews seemed to diminish.

The researchers also found that it was important for the top or featured reviews to match the overall review sentiment, based on the product’s rating given by customers. If the top or featured review matches the review sentiment, the top review’s ability to influence customers gains strength.

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(Edited by : Priyanka Deshpande)