Information acquisition, emotion experience and behaviour intention during online shopping: an eye-tracking study

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this study, an eye-tracking experiment was conducted on an actual website to explore information acquisition, emotion experience and behaviour intention on two information displays (attribute-oriented versus product-oriented) in two contexts of online shopping task (browsing versus searching). Results show that the chosen computer product received more eye fixations than other non-chosen products for both displays. Participants who had more cross-product-attribute eye movements accomplished tasks quicker. For the browsing task, participants had more cross-product-attribute eye movements and accomplished the task faster on the attribute -oriented display than the product-oriented display, whereas no significant difference was observed in the searching task. For emotion experience, participants had more positive emotions in completing the browsing task than the searching task on the attribute-oriented display, whereas no significant difference was observed on the product-oriented display. Approach tendency to a website is positively correlated with positive emotion, and negatively correlated with avoidance tendency. Based on the results, the design of an attribute-oriented information display is recommended if consumers perform mostly experiential behaviour on a website, such as browsing.