Responding to bargaining moves in a digital era: refusals of offers on Mercado Libre Ecuador

Abstract

This chapter investigates the different ways in which sellers on Mercado Libre-Ecuador, a virtual market place, refuse bargaining offers (Placencia 2016). Drawing on work on offers, refusals, bargaining, and CMDA, among other areas, and on the basis of a corpus of refusals taken from 227 buyer-vendor exchanges, it examines how refusals are realized, and the extent to which sellers pay attention to interpersonal concerns in their formulation of refusals. Despite the interactions being anonymous, most sellers were found to use one or more verbal strategies with a mitigating function (e.g. affiliative address, greetings, apologies, justifications, expressions of thanks). Possible factors exerting influence on this behaviour are considered. They include, for example, the medium of interaction, features of the genre and Mercado Libre norms and conventions