Impoliteness Strategies in Negative Online Consumer Reviews in China: A Cross-Platform and Cross-Product Comparison of JD.com and Douyin Mall

Yihuan  Wu

doi:10.54691/a8h5y734

Authors

Yihuan Wu

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.54691/a8h5y734

Keywords:

Impoliteness strategies; negative online consumer reviews; shelf-based e-commerce; content-based e-commerce; review management.

Abstract

Online consumer reviews influence purchasing decisions, but impolite expressions in negative reviews may damage brand reputation and intensify disputes between consumers and merchants. Drawing on Feng and Ren’s framework, this study examines 800 one-star reviews from JD.com and Douyin Mall in the beauty and skincare and 3C digital product sectors. Through manual coding, inter-coder reliability testing, and chi-square analysis, it compares positive impoliteness, negative impoliteness, implicated impoliteness, and sarcasm. On-record impoliteness was the dominant category, while positive impoliteness was the most frequent individual strategy and sarcasm was the least frequent. Douyin Mall contained significantly more positive impoliteness, whereas JD.com contained significantly more negative impoliteness. 3C reviews contained significantly more on-record impoliteness, while beauty and skincare reviews contained more implicated impoliteness. These differences may result from platform transaction logic and product characteristics. The findings offer implications for differentiated review governance and customer relationship management.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

[1] Bousfield, D. (2008). Impoliteness in interaction. John Benjamins.

[2] Culpeper, J. (2011). Impoliteness: Using language to cause offence. Cambridge University Press.

[3] Culpeper, J., Marti, L., Mei, M., Nevala, M., & Schauer, G. (2010). Cross-cultural variation in the perception of impoliteness. Intercultural Pragmatics, 7(4), 597–624.

[4] Feng, W., & Ren, W. (2020). Impoliteness in negative online consumer reviews: A cross-language and cross-sector comparison. Intercultural Pragmatics, 17(1), 1–25.

[5] Herhausen, D., Ludwig, S., & Grewal, D. (2019). Detecting, preventing, and mitigating online firestorms in brand communities. Journal of Marketing, 83(3), 1–21.

[6] Kecskes, I. (2017). Context-dependency and impoliteness in intercultural communication. Journal of Politeness Research, 13(1), 7–32.

[7] Ren, W. (2018). Mitigation in Chinese online consumer reviews. Discourse, Context & Media, 26, 5–12.

[8] Salehan, M., & Kim, D. J. (2016). Predicting the performance of online consumer reviews. Decision Support Systems, 81, 30–37.

[9] Spencer-Oatey, H. (2002). Managing rapport in talk. Journal of Pragmatics, 34(5), 529–545.

[10] Vásquez, C. (2011). Complaints online: The case of TripAdvisor. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(6), 1707–1717.

[11] Wu, X., & Yang, H. (2024). Impoliteness in negative online consumer reviews. International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics, 10(5), 401–407.

[12] Xie, W., Zhao, W., & Xu, Z. (2025). Comparative analysis of multi-platform e-commerce online reviews. International Journal of Intelligent Computing and Cybernetics, 18, 298–325.

[13] Zhang, X., & Li, Y. (2025). Accommodative or defensive? Understanding differentiated managerial responses to online reviews. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 84, Article 104178.

[14] Zhu, D. H., Ye, Z. Q., & Chang, Y. P. (2017). Online customer reviews in business-to-consumer websites: A cross-cultural comparison. Computers in Human Behavior, 76, 483–493.