Hvorfor og hvordan’betyder’ nethandel? Om blandingen af teksttyper i Zalandos netbutik

Abstract

Shopping is one of the many everyday activities that are increasingly digitally remediated. This not only transforms the high streets of our villages and towns, but also the way customers and retailers interact, the way retailers present goods to customers, the way customers can examine goods, and the perceived and real risks customers are exposed to. Goods that can be touched and handled in markets and brick-&-mortar shops must now be inspected and selected by means of words and images, which presupposes linguistic and visual literacies. This article centres on an analysis of Zalando’s use of multimodal resources, and it shows how different registers intertwine. Also, it points to an increasing importance of language and it suggests that online shopping may in fact be less multimodal than face to face shopping, requiring linguistic skills and literacies not everyone possesses. The text analysis is related to findings from eye-tracking research and to findings from marketing studies, and thus bridges between different approaches to the study of online shopping.