Enhancing Shared Understanding in Collaborative Online

This study explores the emerging phenomenon of collaborative online shopping by comparing three navigation support designs: separate navigation with location cue, split screen navigation, and tightly-bonded shared navigation. The impacts of the three navigation support designs on collaborative customers’ actual and perceived shared understanding were investigated in a laboratory experiment. The moderating effect of shopping group structure was also examined. The experimental results show that (1) split screen navigation leads to more actual shared understanding than separate navigation with location cue; (2) tightly-bonded shared navigation leads to less perceived shared understanding than split screen navigation; (3) in terms of actual shared understanding, the superiority of split screen navigation over tightly-bonded shared navigation is less prominent for customers in co-buyers structure than for those in buy/advisor structure. The results also indicate that perceived shared understanding influences the perceived decision quality, which further affects customers’ intentions to revisit the online store.