Assessment of trust building mechanisms of e-commerce: a discourse analysis approach

Professional Discourse & Communication. 2019. No. 4. P. 23–32.

Tikhomirova A., Chuanmin S.

Nowadays the Internet occupies the primary place in many people’s lives. It gives people many different opportunities including online shopping. The deep understanding of all the elements of trust building mechanisms is essential in order to guarantee future prosperous development of the e-commerce sphere as trust seems the key point of e-commerce success. The current study aims to assess trust building mechanisms of online shopping, namely customers’ comments, using the linguistic tool. By adopting the discourse analysis methodology this paper explores the language units used in the comments. First of all, the importance of feedbacks (customers’ comments) was assessed by means of self-compiled questionnaire and the results of the analyses indicate that feedbacks were proved to be significant for customers while forming the buying intention. Then qualitative data was collected from Amazon website. Customers’ comments were collected, systematized and grouped according to the specification of the comment. The following groups were singled out: attitude, duration of usage, quality, price, purpose of usage, function. Comments were divided into positive and negative as well and later on analyzed by means of discourse analysis. Two types of comments were pointed out, namely explanation and evidence (photo). Special features of online comments were pointed out.

Keywords: trust, professional communication, feedback, discourse analysis, online, e-commerce