A concept-level approach in analyzing review readership for E-Commerce persuasive recommendation

A rapid development of E-Commerce platforms has allowed retailers to introduce online product recommendations to persuade consumers purchase decisions. Recommendations system in E-Commerce can be implemented through development of opinion review or feedback system. The visibility of opinion review as a persuasive communication tool in recommendation context has been proven as an important role in purchasing process, which then triggers much attention recently among research scholars. To expand the current discussion on persuasive potential of online review system, this paper aims to explore how the quality of text message may affects the persuasiveness of online recommendation. A concept-level approach will be used in analyzing text readability ease towards generating persuasive communication message. A theoretical model is proposed to measure the effect of review length based on number of concept review towards opinion review readership and its persuasive features. In order to validate the model, we applied basic readability measure of Gunning-Fox Index (FOG) to examine readability ease of opinion review to a dataset containing 1054 reviews extracted from Amazon.com product review. The interrelationship between concept-level analysis, review readership and its persuasive review is further discussed in this paper.