On-line sales talk: aspects of language use in e-commerce

Abstract

The study focuses on aspects of language use in retail web-sites. Retail web-sites are web-sites that facilitate buying and selling over the internet. The aim of the research was to find out the types of sentence structures, voice, verb forms, and word choices that are popular with retail web-site designers. Data were gathered through reviews of popular retail web-sites and interviews with web-site designers. The study revealed that the dominant sentence structures found in retail web-site discourse were simple rather than compound or complex. Active voice and strong verb forms were found to be prevalent in these web-sites. The researchers also found that on-line merchants tend to rely more heavily on technical and graphic wizardry rather than writing skills to achieve marketing objectives. The findings have implications for language trainers preparing graduates for the K-Economy.