The Effects Of Product Image Aesthetics On Consumer Purchase Behavior

Online shopping has become an important e-commerce activity for consumers.In the context of online shopping,product picture is an important channel for the sellers' delivering merchandise information to consumers.A well-designed picture can give the customers a perfect visual experience and then continue to facilitate online shopping decision.Aesthetics has drawn more and more attention in e-commerce website design,as a part of web page,the aesthetics of product picture may significantly affect the consumers' purchase decision and behavior via arousing their emotional and cognitional responses.Most of prior researches focused on web pages aesthetics,there is little research focus on the product picture,and remain a few research space to investigate how the product pictures aesthetics influence the users'decision-making in the context of mobile e-commerce.By integrating the previous theories and research findings,the current study investigates the relationship among these variables as the following:product picture aesthetics,consumer's arousal feeling,attention and purchase behavior.We deep explore the unknown mechanism about how product picture aesthetics affect their purchase behavior through the emotional and cognitional responses and the moderating roles of product type in mobile commerce contexts.We design 2*2 within subject experiment with various product picture aesthetics(classical aesthetics:low vs.high;expressive aesthetics:low vs.high;classical aesthetics vs.expressive aesthetics)and product type(function vs.experience).We conduct some laboratory experiments to test our research model and collect subjective and objective data by questionnaires and eye tracking.We make the following research results:(1)Expressive aesthetics has positive effects on arousal and attention.(2)Classical aesthetics has negative effects on arousal.(3)Compared to the classical aesthetics,the expressive aesthetics can better promote the consumer's feeling of arousal and attention.(4)Consumer's feeling of arousal and attention positively influences their purchase behavior.(5)Product type has a moderating effect on product picture aesthetics and arousal and attention.The expressive product picture aesthetics has a stronger effect on arousal for experience product than for functional product;while the expressive product picture aesthetics has a stronger effect on attention for functional product than for experience product.(6)Classical aesthetics has.direct effects on consumer's purchase behavior,and under the influence of product type,classical aesthetics influence consumer's purchase behavior via arousal emotion.(7)Expressive aesthetics has indirect effects on consumer's purchase behavior,namely the effect of expressive aesthetics on purchasing behavior is entirely mediated by arousal and attention.In short,this study enriches the theory of E-commerce online marketing and human-computer interaction research fields,and gives some practical guides for website's managers and designers on how to select and design the appropriate product pictures to enhance the users' experience and promote the purchasing decision.