Investigating the role of review presentation format in affecting the helpfulness of online reviews

Online reviews are playing an increasingly important role in consumers' online shopping decisions. Studies on investigating the influencing factors of review helpfulness have been conducted extensively in recent years. Previous studies have proved the positive relationship between review characteristics and review helpfulness, for instance, review depth, review valence, image assistance, and identity disclosure. While, research has neglected the effect of presentation format on review helpfulness, especially its combined effect with other review characteristics. This study adopts online review data to examine how presentation format affects review helpfulness with the influence of word count and the number of responses. Besides, this study also reveals how presentation format moderates the effect of word count and the number of responses on review helpfulness across two product types. The results indicate that video-based reviews are perceived as more helpful than other formats. However, the number of responses is less important for video-based reviews, especially for search products. Moreover, word count of image-based reviews is less influential compared to text-based reviews on review helpfulness. It suggests that consumers may ignore the textual information when images enhance reviews. At last, the theoretical contributions, the practical implications, and limitations are discussed.