Appreciation and justification: rapport management in the responses to online shopping reviews

Having played an unprecedentedly critical role in influencing the behaviors of potential consumers in the accelerated age of b2c e-commerce, online shopping reviews pose a daunting challenge to the impression management of... [ view full abstract ]

Having played an unprecedentedly critical role in influencing the behaviors of potential consumers in the accelerated age of b2c e-commerce, online shopping reviews pose a daunting challenge to the impression management of online retailers. However, research into the emerging genre of response to online shopping reviews has been mostly limited to travel industry and response to the negative shopping reviews. Drawing upon online ethnography and interactional sociolinguistic analysis, the study thus examined how online retailers build and maintain rapport with their online customers with both positive and negative comments in a couple of Chinese comprehensive shopping websites, by seeking particularly how rapport was artfully managed with commendable “relational speech acts” (Wu & Lin, 2017 forthcoming) among and across the reply to positive review and negative review. A number of relational speech acts with generic and vibrant contextual characteristics were identified, among which appreciation of customers’ positive comments and justification of poor service/products were specified to be the mainstream rapport management strategies (both frequency over 60%) in dealing with positive and negative shopping reviews respectively. The theoretical findings and practical implications of the study provide timely evidence to the full-blown socio-pragmatic investigation of the emerging genre of reply to online shopping reviews.