Share your view: Impact of co-navigation support and status composition in collaborative online shopping

Abstract

Collaborative online shopping, an emerging paradigm in ecommerce, allows remote shoppers to extend purchaseoriented social interactions into the digital environment. Online vendors have been experimenting ways to facilitate this activity. However, more research needs to be done on identifying what feature can create a pleasing shopping experience and ultimately encourage spending. In this paper, we present an exploration of the impact of conavigation supports, including location cue, split screen, and shared view, on the experiences and performance of 60 co-shopper dyads. We also studied if status composition of shopping companions played a role in this process. By analyzing about 1800 minutes of eye-tracking data, video footages, and web logs, we found that split screen encouraged more diverse product search, shared view enabled better coordination, and location cue was the least distracting. Co-buyers achieved better factual and inference understanding, though buyer-advisor dyads were more likely to stay together.