Published December 18, 2025
| Version v1
Journal article
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What women want? How contextual product displays influence women's online shopping behavior
Authors/Creators
- 1. Universitat Ramon Llull IQS School of Management
- 2. Fundación Comillas
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3.
Tecnológico de Monterrey
- 4. Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey Campus Guadalajara
Description
Abstract
A lack of touch and feel options inhibits online purchases; to enhance online product presentations, this study suggests a potential influence of rich contextual product displays, relative to plain white backgrounds. The results of five studies reveal that the product usage context influences purchase intentions among female customers. Women and men differ in their decision-making processes and evaluate different attributes and benefits prior to purchase. Displaying a product in a rich contextual setting appears to enhance women’s perceptions of emotional value, which heightens their purchase intentions. This article also explicates the additive effect of including contextual elements and confirms the robustness of these effects across product categories and price changes. These findings suggest various notable implications for academics and practitioners.
Notes (English)
Section snippets
The importance of visual product displays
An appropriate visual presentation of a product can compensate for a lack of sensory experience (Grewal, Roggeveen, Runyan, et al., 2017), because visual cues are highly salient especially in early stages of perception, such that they command more attention (Geise and Baden, 2015, Yantis, 2005), which in turn increases the depth of mental and emotional processing (Goldstein & Fink, 1981). Prior research documents the effects of product displays on cognitive, attitudinal, and behavioral
Study 1: The relationship between contextual product displays and purchase intentions
We test our first hypothesis in an online setting, then replicate the results in a controlled lab setting, which also provides a test of our second hypothesis. We then turn to the generalizability of our results and explore several other potential explanations.
Study 2: Investigating different levels of context
To establish the value of rich contextual displays for female shoppers, we adopt a more advanced design, in which we manipulate several levels of contextual richness. Furthermore, we seek to rule out some alternative explanations. A major nonverbal cue in visual merchandising is facial expression, and its effects on purchase intentions have been confirmed (Lindström et al., 2016). To determine if the proposed effect might depend on the presence of a human face, we manipulate the front and back
Design and procedure
For this study, we use a 2 (context level: high, low) × 2 (price: high, low) × 2 (gender: male, female) between-subjects design. Again, respondents indicated their gender, then saw a gender-matching display of jeans in a mock-up online store. The stimuli in this study include the frontal, full context display of a model in an urban context or the product in front of a white background (see Appendix A). We manipulated the price of the jeans, as either $39.99 (less expensive) or $199.99
General discussion
In the innovative and technology-driven field of retailing, great customer experiences are necessary, in order to enable companies to offer the best experience to customers, online, in-store and in an omnichannel journey (Roggeveen et al., 2020). An ongoing debate among ecommerce practitioners asks whether it is beneficial to display a fashion product in a usage context or not, which is part of the broader effort to provide guidance and establish best practices for online store designs. We
Technical info (English)
Acknowledgement:
The authors are grateful for the comments of the two anonymous reviewers and thank the co-editors Dhruv Grewal and Dinesh Gauri, who handled the review process.
Files
2021_What women want (Manuscript Accepted).pdf
Additional details
Dates
- Submitted
-
2021-02-01