A Brief Analysis of Amazon Online Reviews

Shifting from traditional marketing into online marketing has allowed people to share their experiences about various aspects of those products using textual comments known as Product Reviews. As a result of this shifting, people are able to access various websites where they can find reviews for all kind of products, even the rare ones. Thus, these reviews act as a supplementary information and help people to make the right decision before buying products. Reviews that influence one's decision are considered influential reviews, as they provide truthful experiences. Given the list of reviews for a certain product, each user can vote for any given review as helpful or unhelpful. As a result, each review would be given a number that represents how many users found this review helpful. This would indicate how influential each review is. As a result, buyers rely on these reviews and those who wrote these reviews. This study emphasizes on the importance of using user votes as an important source of information for new users. The contribution of this work lies in two aspects. First, it provides a comprehensive statistical analysis of a previously-published dataset containing Amazon reviews. Second, this study insists on the importance of using user votes. This study is the first phase for many future interesting directions. It was shown that the relationship between the number of reviews and the percentage of votes is an inverse relationship.