Abstract
In e-commerce settings, shoppers can navigate to product-specific pages on which they are asked to make yes-or-no decisions about buying a particular item. Beyond that target, there are often other products displayed on the page, such as those suggested by the retailers’ recommendation systems, that can influence consumers’ buying behavior. We propose that display items that come from the same category as the target product (matched) may enhance target purchase by increasing the attractiveness of the presented opportunity. Contrasting this, mismatched display items may reduce purchase by raising awareness of opportunity costs. Eye-tracking was used to explore this framework by examining how different types of displays influenced visual attention. Although target purchase rates were higher for products with matched vs. mismatched displays, there was no difference in fixation time for the target images. However, participants attended to mismatched display items for more time than they did for matched ones consistent with the hypothesized processes. In addition, increases in display attractiveness increased target purchase, but only for matched items, in line with supporting the target category. Given the importance of relative attention and information in determining the impact of display items, we replicated the overall purchase effect across varying amounts of available display information in a second behavioral study. This demonstration of robustness supports the translational relevance of these findings for application in industry.
Highlights
The rise of e-commerce has expanded the scope of retail design and the range of consumer choice settings
Instead we propose that display items create choice frames or contexts that influence the attractiveness of the purchase decision rather than impacting the perceived value of the target
As a control for the overall quality of the decision process captured by this experiment, the binary purchase decision was modeled with a mixed-effect logistic regression on target liking and target price (Model Wald X2 = 300.89, p < 0.001)
Summary
The rise of e-commerce has expanded the scope of retail design and the range of consumer choice settings. Models of the consumer decision-making process, or “decision funnels,” begin with generalized awareness of a product, perhaps as a member of a larger set of options (e.g., Gourville and Norton, 2014). They proceed to narrow, with some form of engagement or information-seeking about more constrained consideration sets, to evaluation of specific options leading to a purchase decision or decisions. Consumers in the information seeking and evaluation stages can arrive at product pages that are designed around a single option. Consumers can evaluate the product, and are prompted to move forward in deciding whether or not to select it for purchase via buttons for “add to cart” or “buy now.”
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