Arvostan rehellistä ja molempia tyydyttävää kaupankäyntiä

This article addresses the shift of cultural practices and essential moral principles of trading after the transition of traditional commerce to online trade. Commerce is approached here as a contractual action between trading partners, and successful trade is considered as a process providing a sense of trust between the trading partners as well as familiarity of social and moral rules guiding the trade. Thus, trade is always a risk of a kind from a single actor’s point of view. The empirical subject of this ethnographic study is the most popular online consumer-to-consumer auction in Finland, Huuto.net (Auction net) and the social interaction taking place there. In consumer-to-consumer commerce, the unprofessional actors usually buy and sell their secondhand products to each other. The article investigates, on the one hand, how false trade and trading partner are constructed in social interaction and, on the other hand, how the features of an ideal actor are depicted in the texts mediated in the interaction of the auction platform. The theoretical approach builds on the performative nature of the web platform, and thus the social interaction is interpreted with the help of Ervin Goffman’s theorising of the dramaturgical approach and the meaning of facework in social situations. The research material was collected by observing the communication and interaction in the web platform and by saving these written texts. The analysis is mostly based on the texts in the actor’s profile pages and on written positive and negative feedback given in the web platform. These texts are read mostly from the rhetorical perspective, by analysing the linguistic means of persuading and justifying – and maintaining faces – in the social interaction.