A Comparative Study Of Chinese And American Online Shopping Complaints And Complaint-responses

As a new means of communication, World Wide Web (WWW) requires newcommunication skills, since thousands of culturally different people―meet‖on theInternet. Accompanying the development of WWW, e-commerce is on an increasingmomentum, where complaints are key to both online shopping consumers and sellersfor their face threatening nature and online business Demolisher.Based on Laforest‘s (2002) complaint and complaint response strategies, as wellas House and Kasper‘s (1981) directness and severity levels of complaints, this paperconducts a comparative study of the online shopping complaint and complaintresponse realizations and directness and severity levels in complaints.The author collects400pieces of complaints and complaint responses from twoonline shopping websites. A combination of quantitative and qualitative method isapplied to classify and analyze the data in this paper.The author finds that:1)―mentioning the offensive act‖is preferred by Americanand Chinese;2) both Chinese and American consumers are inclined to use directcomplaints and intensified complaints.3) the Chinese sellers employ mitigatedcomplaint responses, and the American choose responses with no intensification ormitigation. The findings are discussed from the perspective of face threatening andconflict management styles.This research enriches studies on cross-cultural pragmatics, complainingbehavior and computer mediated communication. Besides, this paper offersimplication for cross-cultural communication and second language learning andteaching.