What is it about?
The present research explores how three types of selected technological affordances (perceived affordance, imagined affordance and actualized affordance) of scan and go (S&G) apps facilitate customers’ achievement of goals in retail shopping. It fills an important gap in the literature by exploring how consumers interpret, anticipate and experience S&G apps in an in-store shopping environment.
Featured Image
Photo by Alexas_Fotos on Unsplash
Why is it important?
This study is important because it moves beyond adoption metrics to explain how customers actually experience Scan & Go technologies in-store. By introducing the Interactive Buying Process Theory and a triadic affordance lens (perceived, imagined, actualised), it shows why the same technology enables different outcomes across users. This insight helps scholars refine affordance theory and helps retailers design technologies that better align customer expectations, capabilities, and lived shopping experiences.
Perspectives
Developing this paper allowed us to challenge linear, stage-based buying models that treat consumers as passive decision-makers. The Interactive Buying Process Theory better reflects contemporary in-store realities by capturing how perception, imagination, and experience continuously interact with technology, context, and user capability. I see this theory as a more realistic and human-centred lens for understanding digital retail behaviour, especially as shopping becomes increasingly interactive, situated, and experiential rather than sequential.
Muhammad Naeem
Canterbury Christ Church University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Retailing and technological affordances: understanding the subjective realities of interactive buying through Scan and Go apps, European Journal of Marketing, January 2026, Emerald,
DOI: 10.1108/ejm-02-2022-0139.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
