Designing product lists for e-commerce: The effects of sorting on consumer decision making

Abstract

One common information display design that appears in nearly all electronic shopping sites is product lists on Web pages. Many electronic shopping sites provide sorting functions for product quality attributes. However, the extant literature has not been particularly insightful on how consumers respond to product lists sorted in different orders (i.e., ascending, descending, and random). Despite the intuitive postulation that products appearing in an early position of a list may draw more attention, it is not evident whether and how different sorting of products in a list affect consumers' purchase decisions. The purpose of this research is to investigate how product sorting influences consumers' decision making. Specifically, the focus is on the effect of sorting by product quality attributes on the importance of quality and price in consumers' product choice and on the formation of their consideration set. Results from the experiment show that, when product quality and price are positively but not perfectly correlated, individuals perceive quality to be more important and they tend to include products with higher quality in their consideration set when they are exposed to a descending list than when they are exposed to a random or ascending list. Therefore, online vendors could apply descending sorting to promote the sales of high-quality products.