How Do Different Types of Merchant Pictures Affect Online Market Performance? Investigating from the Picture Content and Composition Perspective

Pictures are essential website elements in digital platforms. In this paper, we find that online merchants with different types of merchant pictures have heterogeneous performance on sales. Using a brand type picture demonstrates more voucher sales than a product type picture or an environment type picture. We explain the sales variation from the perspective of picture content and picture composition (the arrangement of objects to make it compelling). To account for the effect of picture composition, we construct measures based on figure-ground perception theories. Besides, we discriminate the value of picture content with merchant attributes. Results show that both content and composition can affect merchant sales performance. The impact of composition tends to be the joint effect of all intercorrelated cues rather than independently. The pure effect of brand content can lead to more sales if the merchant belongs to a franchise group, indicating higher brand awareness.