Create the best first glance: The cross-cultural effect of image background on purchase intention

As globalization drives more firms toward cross-border e-commerce (CBEC), a well-designed decision support system becomes crucial to gain a competitive edge in the international market. Product images, a vital aspect of the system interface, play a significant role in shaping users' first impressions, facilitating seller-buyer information interaction, and ultimately enhancing users' decisions making in the system. Across a series of studies, this research investigates the effect of cultural differences (thinking style: holistic vs. analytic) on image background and reveals the underlying mechanism. Results show that online consumers from cultures characterized by holistic thinking style (Chinese sample) are more prone to purchase products presented with contextual backgrounds than those with white backgrounds, while this effect is absent for online consumers from cultures that tend to think in an analytic way (American sample). This effect is also observed when the thinking style is primed within the culture in separate samples from the United States and China. Study 3 employs eye-tracking technology and shows that holistic thinking, compared to analytic thinking, results in an asymmetry in cognitive effort to purchase the same products framed with contextual and white background images. Specifically, contextual (vs. white) background information greatly assists holistic thinking consumers in understanding the product, enabling them to spend less cognitive effort on product information processing. Instead, the cognitive effort that analytic thinking consumers spare in the product information is not affected by the background. Finally, we discuss theoretical contributions and practical insights for CBEC retailers and system designers that the findings indicate.