Merchandising the Intangibles: Unraveling the Benefits of Visualizing Consumption Experience in Service E-Tailing

Images have been extensively employed in service e-tailing to overcome the intangible nature of services. Despite the importance of delineating the physical vibe where service is delivered, there is a paucity of research on how visual cues can be designed in images to communicate the actual consumption experience of a service offering and in turn, drive customers’ purchasing behavior. Synthesizing extant literature on service tangibility, we identify consumption process and outcome as two predominant dimensions of service consumption that entice purchase by enhancing the informativity of a service offering both associatively and epistemically. Additionally, we consider consumer’s reliance on service tangibility as an impetus that alters the power of visualizations. Conceiving human elements as the communicator that transmits consumption information, we employ computer vision techniques to extract human in the portal images of more than 299,000 localized service offerings and propose an experimental design for future investigations.