Quantifying the Impact of Online Product Visual Presentation on Social Shopping: An Image Processing-enabled Empirical Study

Description

E-commerce and social media has significantly changed people's shopping habits. Nowadays, people heavily use online channels to collect information on products and make purchases. Social networking services have made it easier and popular for people (friends and people with mutual interests) to exchange opinions on products and team up to get bulk discounts, which caused the appearance of social shopping websites, such as pinterest.com and mogujie.com. When shopping online, people often rely on the descriptions and photos provided by sellers to understand the quality of products, especially for experience goods. This project focuses on product photos in this process and investigates how the visual presentation of products affects people's perceptions and purchase intentions in a social shopping context. In marketing and psychology literature, there were studies that qualitatively investigate product presentation, such as color, size, shape, and layout of products, through experiments and surveys. Nevertheless, this project aims to extend them by including many more subtle aspects of visual presentations delivered through product photos with the help of modem processing techniques. Furthermore, this project will also investigate how the effects of such visual features in photos are influenced by peers' opinions in the social network in a social shopping context.