PurposeMost recent service experience research considers customers as sensemakers and sensemaking as a focal process in experience construction. Despite this, the sensemaking theory engendered in organization studies has not been applied in the quest for an in-depth understanding of the service experience. This study introduces a sensemaking perspective to the service experience and develops a conceptualization of how customers construct their experiences cognitively through sensemaking.Design/methodology/approachThe service experience literature is dominated by a focus on firms implementing service experiences for customers. This study, in contrast, investigates service experience and its formation from the customers' viewpoint: how service experiences are formed as a part of customers' everyday life and sensemaking processes instead of under service providers' control.FindingsService experience is characterized as a mental picture – a collage of meanings created by a customer through the sensemaking processes. A sensemaking framework that characterizes service experience formation and its four seminal dimensions, including the self-related, sociomaterial, retrospective and prospective sensemaking, is introduced.Originality/valueThis article contributes to the service literature by introducing a new theoretical lens through which the service experience concept can be investigated and reframed.

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The tremendous increase in online shopping has created a growing demand to understand online shopping behavior. This study contributes to this understanding by identifying ideal types among online shoppers. An ideal type is an analytical construct used to ascertain similarities and deviations to concrete cases in an individual phenomenon. Theoretically, the study draws from different perspectives to create a multifaceted view of online shoppers. The purpose is not to categorize online shoppers under a specific category but rather to help understand different typically occurring online shopping behaviors. Through thematic analysis of the data from 31 participants, this study presents five ideal types of online shoppers: conservative shoppers, rational shoppers, hedonistic shoppers, spontaneous shoppers, and vanguard shoppers. The formed ideal types serve as the main theoretical contribution of this study. From a practical standpoint, implications for online shop providers on how to accommodate the needs of each ideal type are provided.

This qualitative study investigates the barriers to responsible consumption in e-commerce from the online shoppers’ viewpoint. The purpose of the study is to increase our understanding of what prevents young adults from making responsible purchases in online stores in the context of fashion retail. The data were collected by interviewing ten Finnish fashion shoppers aged 23-27 years. The findings show that responsible consumption is perceived as complex and challenging. The study identified barriers related to online stores and consumers themselves. Online store implementation (product availability, information and transparency, and pricing) is vital in facilitating online shoppers’ responsible purchasing decisions. However, consumers’ personal consumption patterns and habits, and problems related to time use and responsibility assessment, can also be constraints on responsible consumption. Future studies are encouraged to investigate how online solutions, such as user interfaces, online tools, and apps, could better assist consumers in overcoming the identified barriers.

In online shopping, product returns are very common. In order to reduce them, one must first understand who are making them and why are they being made. In this study, we aim to address these questions by examining product return behaviour from a consumer-centric rather than the more traditional product-centric, retailer-centric, and order-centric perspectives. More specifically, we focus on the effects of four demographic characteristics of consumers (i.e., gender, age, education, and income) as well as their payment method preference on their product return frequency and product return reasons. As the data, we use the responses from 560 Finnish online consumers, which were collected with an online survey and are analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively. We find gender, age, payment method preference, and average online shopping frequency to affect average product return frequency, whereas product return reasons were found to be affected by only gender and average product return frequency.

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