Understanding the Influence from Web-shop Design on Consumers’ Visual Attention and Product Evaluation

Buying behaviour theory goes back to the start of the 50’s and over the years different models have been developed influenced by different sociological views and trends. In the age of digitalization and e-commerce these theories seem to be less useful and need revision. In the early days of the Web, research argues for a broader view on the complex decision process (Bettman et al., 1998; Hansen, 2005) and regards consumers having constructive decision processes. In the light of on-line sale additional perspectives on decision-models are still needed and recent research emphasizes the important in studying relations between human visual attention and intention to purchase (Clement, 2013).
Several companies have found an additional market place on-line, whereas the appearance of the products is often very similar to the physical shop. This goes especially for pharmaceutical products, where pictures of the product package together with pictures of the pills are used as eye-catcher on-line. The market for e-health is increasing (Usher and Skinner, 2010) and distribution of consumers purchasing on-line health products looks similar to the distribution in average populations. As the on-line drug store goes across culture and national borders it also challenges marketer to make the right set-up for a web-shop. In this paper customers’ visual attention during search for drugs on-line is investigated, relating visual attention and evaluation to a particular web-design.