Electronic Complaints: An Empirical Study of Negative Reviews from Amazon.com Users

Ali Kiliç, Çiğdem Karatepe

Abstract


Unprecedented advances have been seen in E-commerce with the spread of digital commerce and customer relations on commercial websites, such as Amazon. As a result, investigation of this type of communication has opened up new horizons for discourse analysts. This study aims to identify the complaint strategies used by customers and the reasons behind them. With this in mind, the researchers formed a corpus of the most helpful negative reviews posted on Amazon. Similar to previous studies on complaints in spoken communication, the present analysis investigated the different complaint strategies speakers used to formulate their complaints. Additionally, politeness strategies and face concerns were examined in these complaints. The results indicated that customers used eight different complaint strategies, the most frequent being showing their disappointment, anger and annoyance while making their complaints. The reasons for their complaints were delivery problems and unhelpful customer services behaviours.

Keywords


Online Communication, Complaints, Consumer Reviews, Negative Online Reviews, Comment Analysis

Full Text:

PDF

References


Altun, L. (2019). A Corpus Based Study: Analysis of the Positive Reviews of Amazaon.com Users. Advances in Language and Literary Studies, 10(1):123-128

Brown, P. & Levinson, S.C.(1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cenni, I. &Goethals, P. (2017). Negative hotel reviews on TripAdvisor: A cross-linguistic analysis. Discourse, Context and Media, 16, 22-30. DOI: 10.1016/jdcm.2017.01.004

Clemons, E. (2006). When online reviews meet hyperdifferentiation: A study of the craft beer industry. Journal of management information systems, 23(2), 149-171.

Decock, S. & Depraetere, I. (2018). (In)directness and complaints: A reassessment. Journal of Pragmatics, 132, 33-46. Doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2018.04.010

Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction Ritual: Essays on face-to-face behaviour. New York: Penguin Books.

Ho, V. (2017). Achieving service recovery through responding to negative online reviews. Discourse & Community, 11(1), 31-50. Doi: 10.1177/1750481316683292

Karatepe, Ç. (2021) Hedged Turkish complaints in requests in the Problem-Solution text pattern. Pragmatics & Society, 12(3), 490-507. https://doi.org/10.1075/ps

Karatepe, Ç. (in press) ‘The only five star thing about this hotel is its prices’: A study on restrictive adverb ‘only’ in negative hotel reviews. In Hatipoğlu, Ç. & Akbaş, E. (Eds.) (in press) Metadiscourse in Non-academic Contexts: A genre based approach towards exploring rhetorical preferences signalling interaction with the audience. Washington DC: Lexington.

Krosnick, J. A., Boninger, D. S.,Chuang, Y. C., Berent, M. K. &Carnot, C. G. (1993). Attitude strength: One construct or many related constructs? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(6), 1132-1151. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.65.6.1132

Kumar, N.& Benbasat, I. (2006). The influence of recommendations and consumer reviews on evaluations of websites. Information Systems Research, 17(4), 425-439. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23015815

Meinl, Marja Ebba. (2010). Electronic Complaints: An Empirical Study on British English and German Complaints on eBay. Unpublished Dissertation, Bonn University. Available at: hss. ulb.uni-bonn.de/2010/2122/2122.pdf (accessed 4 April 2016).

Meyerhoff, M. (2011). Introducing Sociolinguistics. London: Routledge.

Mudambi, S. M. & Schuff, D. (2010). What makes a helpful online review? A study of customer reviews on Amazon.com. MIS Quarterly 34(1):185-200. Doi: 10.2307/20721420

Murphy, B.& Neu, J. (1996). ‘My grade is too low’: The speech act set of complaining. In Gass, S. & Neu, J. (Eds.) (1996). Speech Acts Across Cultures. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Ghose, A., and Ipeirotis, P. 2006. “Designing Ranking Systems for Consumer Reviews: The Impact of Review Subjectivity on Product Sales and Review Quality,” in Proceedings of the 16th Annual Workshop on Information Technology and Systems retrieved from http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~panos/publications/wits2006.pdf

Van Meeren, S. (2016). Customer Complaints on the Twitter Profiles of the NMBS and SNCF: a pragmatic and cross-cultural study. Unpublished Masters Thesis. University of Gent, Gent-Belgium.

Searle, J.(1975). Indirect Speech Acts. In Peter C.&Morgan, J. L. (Eds.), Syntax and Semantics. Vol. 3, Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press.

Seidlhofer, B. (2002). Closing a conceptual gap: the case for a description of English as a linguafranca. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 11(2),133-158. Doi:10.1111/1473-4192.00011

Sotiriadis, M. D. (2017). "Sharing tourism experiences in social media: A literature review and a set of suggested business strategies", International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Vol. 29 Issue: 1, pp.179-225, https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCHM-05-2016-0300 Permanent link to this document: https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCHM-05-2016-0300

Vásquez, C.(2011).The Discourse of Online Consumer Reviews. London: Bloomsbury.

Vásquez, C.(2011). Complaints Online: The Case of TripAdvisor. Journal of Pragmatics, 43 (6), 1707–17. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2010.11.007.

Yule, G. (1996). Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Zhu, F., & Zhang, X. (2006). The influence of online consumer reviews on the demand for experience goods: The case of video games. ICIS 2006 Proceedings, 25.




DOI: https://doi.org/10.7575/aiac.alls.v.12n.5.p.42

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.




Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

2010-2023 (CC-BY) Australian International Academic Centre PTY.LTD.

Advances in Language and Literary Studies

You may require to add the 'aiac.org.au' domain to your e-mail 'safe list’ If you do not receive e-mail in your 'inbox'. Otherwise, you may check your 'Spam mail' or 'junk mail' folders.