The effects of navigation support and group structure on collaborative online shopping

Abstract

As a new paradigm of e-commerce, collaborative online shopping fulfills online consumers' needs to shop with close ones in a social and collaborative environment. While previous e-commerce research and practice mainly focus on consumers' individual shopping behavior, a recent trend is for consumers to buy things together online. This study proposes two new types of navigation support and investigates how different types of navigation support influence consumers' collaborative online shopping experience. Specifically, their impacts on consumers' coordination performance and perceived usefulness are assessed by comparing two types of extant navigation support in a lab experiment. Meanwhile, the moderating role of the group structure of collaborative consumers is also assessed. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.