Yelp: The average score of group buying reviews is 10% lower than the average score of non-group buying reviews

A man cannot stand without trust, so what about businesses? Recently, computer scientists from Boston University and Harvard University found in a survey that although group buying can promote sales of local businesses, it will damage their reviews on some review sites such as Yelp.

Scientists from the two universities conducted the following research: they studied 16,000 Groupon deals generated in 20 cities across the United States from January to July this year; they monitored group buying deals every 10 minutes every day to obtain the change in their sales over time; they summarized the number of times each deal was liked on Facebook; and they also studied public reviews from Yelp - a total of 56,000 reviews of 2,496 group buying deals generated by 2,332 merchants - to examine how consumers' evaluations of merchants changed before and after the group buying.

Their research has achieved great results: for example, their weekly revenue forecast for each city of Groupon is surprisingly similar to the data in the S-1 document submitted by Groupon to the Securities and Exchange Commission; they also found that the number of times a group buying deal is liked on Facebook has a great impact on the sales of group buying; but the most striking finding is the negative impact of group buying on the evaluation of local merchants. They found that although group buying can increase the number of reviews, the average score generated by group buying related reviews is 10% lower than the average score generated by non-group buying.

In order to specifically investigate the impact of Groupon, they further screened reviews that mentioned the word "Groupon". The results showed that the ratings of reviews that mentioned the word "Groupon" were on average 10% lower than those that did not, and a small number were even 20% lower.

Obviously, this is bad news for the group buying industry, which is already in a difficult situation. However, the research on the combination of group buying and social networking by scientists from Boston University and Harvard University is obviously meaningful. If a similar analysis engine can be built, people will have another powerful tool to understand the impact of social networks.

The article comes from 36kr