The Interaction of Individual and Universal Online Shopping Scripts

This article employs cognitive script theory to examine a typical online shopping procedure from a customer's point of view. Individual scripts gained from interviews held with 8 experienced online shoppers reflect a high degree of personal preferences in the order of actions, decisions, and events associated with online shopping. Designing an online shop according to an average online shopping script built on such data might fail to meet the expectations of each individual customer. Two surveys employing ratings for typicality and position of script actions look into common elements of reported scripts, individual derivations, and the interaction of both. Proximity data derived from position ratings is analyzed via cluster analysis and the Pathfinder network model (Dearholt & Schvanefeldt, 1990). Results reveal groups of actions that can be interpreted as scenes within the proposed online shopping script. Individual deviations affect only certain actions but not the entire script. Although lacking experience with online shops, novice users show similar expectations about the general order of actions as experienced users.