The Study of Cross-Cultural Differences in Online Visual Merchandising of Imagery Fluency and Pleasure Between Eastern and Western Consumers

In online stores, consumers rely on “sight” to evaluate products. Higher fluency of product pictorial presentation increases consumer preferences. The cultural context also affects customers’ behavior, Eastern consumers tend to focus on the relationship between the subject and the context more than Western consumers. This study investigates how product display in different fluency influences cross-cultural consumers’ cognition and attention and the Eye-tracker is applied to record participants’ eye movement. The result demonstrates that while the product images present with semantically matched text and simpler context, the consumers can perceive information in a shorter time. Furthermore, compared to Western consumers, Eastern consumers pay more attention to product images and are stimulated by mismatched image-text contexts, which increase their imagination.