Exploring the impacts of consumers’ systematic and intuitive cognitive styles on their visual attention patterns in online shopping environments: Emphasis on eye-tracking method

Abstract

We are living in a hypercompetitive market. Therefore, companies running online shopping malls must muster their wisdom to make online shopping websites one of their strategic assets. To meet this objective, companies should understand online consumers’ cognitive styles, and then design their online websites according to the styles. In this sense, we focus on two cognitive styles such as systematic type and intuitive type. The former means that consumers may pay more attention to reasonable statements about target product before making decisions, while the latter indicates that consumers may react more sensitively to intuitive information such as images and abstract conjecture. For the sake of novel approach to conducting experiments, we adopted an eye-tracking approach which we believe is more reliable in providing relevant information capable of answering our research questions. For the utilitarian product like notebook computer, systematic type users may show higher TFD (Total Fixation Duration) and FC (Fixation Count) to consumer reviews than intuitive type users. Also, intuitive type users may be more sensitive to special purchase opportunity-giving events information with higher TFD and FC than systematic type users. Through our experiments with an eye-tracking method, we could conclude that a strategic redesign of the online shopping websites is necessary where consumers' cognitive styles need to be significantly considered.