Sentiment analysis on consumers’ opinions – evaluating online retailers through analyzing sentiment for face masks during COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT Customer opinions on a product or retailer can be assessed through analyzing their textual reviews submitted to online communities. While the attitudinal information of a text post can be gauged by studying the sentiment words used, a method has to be sought for more effectively evaluating the sentiment strengths, because different writers may have varied interpretations on a word’s sentiment. The objective of this paper is to develop a new integrated approach by adopting Sentiment Analysis and Evidential Reasoning for the online retailers’ timely evaluation of the public sentiments toward different product alternatives. The finding of the study has established the benefit of efficiently evaluating the customers’ feedback toward products and monitoring the changes of customer preferences on product attributes over time. The results obtained from the proposed approach are superiority to other decision-making tools. Graphical Abstract