Designing Product List on E-tailing Websites: The Effect of Sorting on Consumer Decision

Abstract

One common information display design which appears in nearly all the online retailing websites is the product list on e-tailing websites, where a number of products are displayed together to allow online consumers to search for and choose from. While some e-tailers present their product list in an alphabetic order of brand or model, which results in a somewhat random list in terms of product quality, many e-tailers provide sorting functions which allow consumers to sort the products in a descending or ascending order. However, the extant literature has not been particularly insightful on how consumers respond to different order of product list. Despite the intuitive postulation that items appearing in an early position of a list may draw more attentions from consumers (serial position effect), it is not evident whether and how different order of products in a list affect consumer decisions. The purpose of this research is to investigate how product list design (ascending list, descending list, and random list) influence consumer decisions. Such investigations are important because the design of product listing pages explains more than half of the variance in monthly sales on commercial websites. Accounting for the sorting effect in models that explain online consumers’ decision making can enable marketers to construct strategically product list driven by business objectives.