Effect of 3D product presentation on consumer preference in E-Commerce

Abstract

Current electronic commerce offerings to the end customer have become a globally accessible mainstream purchasing pattern through the Internet technologies. E-commerce customer interaction through the web offering is largely preferred over the traditional brick and mortar purchasing interactions. With the advancement of rich content and multi modal user interaction support through web, the online customer experience has reached to a point where physical exploration and tactile information about the product are not crucial for purchases of generic goods; However there is a vital research question to be answered: do e-commerce customers prefer to have more infusion of product related information to make better purchase choice with confidence. To answer this, we have researched 3D support for product exploration. The goal of this research is to study the effects of 3D product presentations on consumer experience, value perception, purchase decisions and other factors in e-commerce environments under different platforms. This paper describes two experiments conducted to investigate these effects using 360 degree product views with varying degree of freedom in control and quality. The results indicate interesting positive effects on consumers using computers and mixed effects on consumers using mobile phones. This paper suggests using carefully designed interaction models to minimize those challenging effects and yield the positive effects; it also highlights the major challenges that need to be addressed for more engaging and convenient mobile based e-commerce experience as further studies.