Psychology Research and Behavior Management (Jan 2020)
Low-Order Webpage Layout in Online Shopping Facilitates Purchase Decisions: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials
Abstract
Qian Shang, 1 Jia Jin, 2 Guanxiong Pei, 3 Cuicui Wang, 4 Xiaoyi Wang, 5 Junping Qiu 6 1School of Management, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou, People’s Republic of China; 2Business School, Ningbo University, Ningbo, People’s Republic of China; 3Zhejiang Lab, Hangzhou, People’s Republic of China; 4School of Management, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, People’s Republic of China; 5School of Management, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, People’s Republic of China; 6Chinese Academy of Science and Education Evaluation, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou, People’s Republic of ChinaCorrespondence: Xiaoyi WangSchool of Management, Zhejiang University, 38# Zheda Road, Hangzhou 310027, People’s Republic of ChinaTel +86 138 5710 6999Email [email protected] Junping QiuChinese Academy of Science and Education Evaluation, Hangzhou Dianzi University, 1158# Road 2, Hangzhou 310018, People’s Republic of ChinaEmail [email protected]: In online shopping, the webpage layout plays an important part in the consumer’s experience. The present study aims to investigate whether the webpage order and which order level (high order vs low order) facilitate consumers’ instant purchase decisions for products.Methods: Fourteen right-handed healthy undergraduates and graduate students participated in the experiment as paid participants. In the experiment, participants were presented with daily products in different online shopping webpages (high-order vs low-order) and reported their purchase intentions between purchase and not purchase. Meanwhile, Electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded from the participants throughout the experiment. In the analysis process, two event-related potentials (ERP) components, P2 and late positive potential (LPP) were mainly focused to examine the cognitive mechanism underlying the purchase decisions.Results: The behavioral data found that the low-order shopping webpage facilitated participants’ purchase intentions compared with the high-order one. Neurophysiologically, increased P2 amplitudes and increased LPP amplitudes were revealed for the low-order webpage compared to the high-order webpage. The P2 indicates the early stage of attention engagement and discordant perception, while the LPP can be taken as a reflection of the late stage of the emotional self-control process.Conclusion: These results provided evidence that webpage order influenced people’s purchase decisions. Low-order webpage design invoked more attention engagement and discordant perception and consumed more self-control resources than the high-order webpage design, which contributed to the higher purchase intentions.Keywords: online shopping, webpage order, purchase decisions, event-related potentials, P2, LPP
