The Integrated Study of Cross-cultural Differences in Visual Merchandising Design and Consumer’s Visual Perception on E-Commerce Platform

Abstract

E-commerce and merchandise globalization has rapidly developed in recent years. Consequently, the demand for cross-border consumption increases continuously. When a product sells and displays on the online platform, people in different cultural backgrounds might perceive this product differently. In addition, those cultural differences might cause variations of visual perception preference and visual merchandising display on e-commerce websites. Past research has shown the two distinct patterns of visual perception between East and West. East Asians are “context-dependent” by attending to the relationship between the product and contextual information. In contrast, Westerners are described as “context-independent” because they focus on the product itself rather than its context. However, little is known about how cultural differences in consumers’ visual perception are related to online merchandise visual design. In this research, we investigated the consumers’ visual perception on E-commerce websites, including Western (e.g., the United States and the United Kingdom) and Eastern countries (e.g., Taiwan and Japan). Study 1 examined the cultural difference of visual merchandising presentation on various cross-border E-commerce websites by using pixel calculation of product in the context. Study 2 investigated various combinations of merchandising visual display, including context-independent and context-dependent visual presentation, to simulate the actual merchandise visual scene on the website. This research contributes to the fields of online merchandise visual presentation and cultural visual perception.