The Effects of Visual and Verbal Information on Attitudes and Purchase Intentions in Internet Shopping

摘要

The present study investigated how different product presentationformats (visual vs. verbal) influence consumer attitudes towardproduct and purchase intentions in Internet shopping. The overallresults from two Web experiments simulating Internet apparel shop-ping showed that both visual and verbal information had significanteffects on affective and cognitive attitudes toward apparel products,but only verbal information had a significant effect on purchaseintention. Though the superiority of visual information was pre-dicted based on prior literature, the results of the study supportedverbal superiority. This finding provides an important implicationfor Internet retailers who tend to pay more attention to visual prod-uct presentation. Although visual product presentation is also foundto be important, detailed product descriptions are critical to posi-tively influence consumer shopping experience in Internet shopping