Understanding Online Consumer Behavior at E-commerce Portals Using Eye-Gaze Tracking

TLDR

E‑commerce sites thrive even as brick‑and‑mortar sales decline, and their web‑page design, search options, and layout can strongly shape the customer base. This study aims to pinpoint which graphical interface elements most influence consumers’ visual attention during online shopping. Using eye‑gaze tracking on 76 participants, the authors recorded first fixation and fixation counts across interface parts and visualized the data with heat maps. Results show that interface design significantly attracts attention, with distinct gender‑specific preferences, suggesting implications for product, packaging, and promotional design.

Abstract

E-commerce websites are doing extremely well despite the global slowdown in the traditional brick-and-mortar retail industry. Web page design, search options, and graphical layout may greatly influence the customer base of any e-commerce website. This paper intends to identify the most influential elements of a graphical interface and their effect on consumers' visual attention. Visual layouts having major influence on customers' decisions during online shopping were investigated using eye-gaze tracking. Data from 76 respondents were collected to identify parts of the graphical interface attaining maximum user attention in terms of first fixation of eye-gaze and fixation count. Heat maps were used to visualize the results. The results revealed a clear impact of graphical interface on gaining user attention. Further, the experiment also revealed gender-specific visual preferences toward various parts of graphical user interface. The results may further be extended to evaluate product design, packaging design, promotional design, and graphical interfaces of websites.