I'll try my best. Am Scottish, living in Scotland and bought last year so here goes.....
Many properties are marketed as 'offers over', basically meaning that vendors would expect you to offer above the marketed price. In the good old prosperous days it wasn't unusual to expect 20-30% over the advertised price. I once sold a flat for just under 50% over marketed price, but that was a bit extreme even for those days.
Fast forward a few years and a gigantic recession and we sold our last property last year for about 7% over asking price. It's also becoming more common to see fixed price and offer in the region of....
It will very much depend where in the country that you're planning to buy, popularity of the area, catchment schools etc.
Vendors are also expected to provide a Home Report for viewers when they put their property on the market. This covers a valuation, surveyors report of the property and vendor questionnaire. Any viewer can request a copy of this at no cost to themselves and does away with he previous system where viewers had to pay for a survey of a property they were interested in buying.
Traditionally the Scottish system seemed to be a fairer one for the buyer and the gazumping (sp?) thing didn't really ever happen up here and much less likely to be in a collapsing chain, although I'm not too sure what the situation is now with the recession and mortgage availability etc.
Trying to think of anything else... Ask me anything else you think of and I'll try my best. HTH!