Understanding Online Consumer Behavior at E-commerce Portals Using Eye-Gaze Tracking

E-commerce websites are doing extremely well despite the global slowdown in the traditional brick-and-mortar retail industry. Web page design, search options, and graphical layout may greatly influence the customer base of any e-commerce website. This paper intends to identify the most influential elements of a graphical interface and their effect on consumers’ visual attention. Visual layouts having major influence on customers’ decisions during online shopping were investigated using eye-gaze tracking. Data from 76 respondents were collected to identify parts of the graphical interface attaining maximum user attention in terms of first fixation of eye-gaze and fixation count. Heat maps were used to visualize the results. The results revealed a clear impact of graphical interface on gaining user attention. Further, the experiment also revealed gender-specific visual preferences toward various parts of graphical user interface. The results may further be extended to evaluate product design, packaging design, promotional design, and graphical interfaces of websites.