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Effect of 3D Product Presentation on Consumer Preference in E-Commerce

Conference Paper · May 2017

DOI: 10.1109/MERCon.2017.7980532

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 Effect of 3D Product Presentation on Consumer
Preference in E-Commerce
Supun Hewawalpita, Indika Perera
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka
{supungs.10, indika}@cse.mrt.ac.lk

Abstract— Current electronic commerce offerings to the end to purchase is comparatively low against the traditional instore
customer have become a globally accessible mainstream purchases. However, e-commerce users over compensate for
purchasing pattern through the Internet technologies. E- the convenience and forego options for thorough inspections
commerce customer interaction through the web offering is for a better perceived purchase that would have made instore
largely preferred over the traditional brick and mortar purchase equivalent. The growth and technological
purchasing interactions. With the advancement of rich content advancement made current e-commerce offerings to be far
and multi modal user interaction support through web, the superior compared to its early stages, i.e., first and second
online customer experience has reached to a point where physical waves of e-commerce from late 90’s to mid-2000 era. We are
exploration and tactile information about the product are not
experience the third wave of e-commerce equipped with smart
crucial for purchases of generic goods; However there is a vital
devices with location and context aware services. While there
research question to be answered: do e-commerce customers
prefer to have more infusion of product related information to is a long way to go in order to provide exact customer
make better purchase choice with confidence. To answer this, we experience as they would receive in traditional commerce,
have researched 3D support for product exploration. The goal of there is a number of promising research directions we see today
this research is to study the effects of 3D product presentations to fuse with current e-commerce for better commerce offering.
on consumer experience, value perception, purchase decisions Although sensory types of touch, taste and smell cannot be
and other factors in e-commerce environments under different
practically provided for e-Commerce product inspections
platforms. This paper describes two experiments conducted to
through the current web technologies, use of 3D visualization
investigate these effects using 360 degree product views with
varying degree of freedom in control and quality. The results
is one technique that some e-commerce websites use to
indicate interesting positive effects on consumers using overcome the existing limitations and provide a better sensory
computers and mixed effects on consumers using mobile phones. experience to their consumers. This is achieved by using
This paper suggests using carefully designed interaction models number of photos from different angles or a 3D model of the
to minimize those challenging effects and yield the positive product/object. Allowing viewing all parts of the product
effects; it also highlights the major challenges that need to be interactively have an effect on fast reasoning and
addressed for more engaging and convenient mobile based e- understanding of the object by consumer. Particularly the 360°
commerce experience as further studies. turnable views using the actual photos are found to be more
appealing to the consumers than 3D models [1].
Keywords— e-commerce; 3-D product presentation; consumer
experience; 360 view Many different software and hardware solutions are
available to create and display 360° product views. The basic
principle behind those is mapping the 360 degrees of space to a
I. INTRODUCTION set of actual images taken around an object at evenly spaced
E-commerce has grown up to be a major part of the Internet angles, thus creating a pseudo 3D visualization. There is also
accounting for trillions of dollars in sales. Commercial complex variation in which the view can be rotated around the
activities, whether in traditional physical form or virtual form vertical axis as well the horizontal axis (as explained in Fig. 1).
with electronic means, share common factors when
transactions happen. Usually commerce transaction occur when Although the technology was available for some years,
buyer and seller interact in a given market place so that the there has not been much research on the actual effect of 3D
buyer can inspect the product or service being offered and upon visualization on consumers’ perception of the product and
satisfying with the purchase decision exchange the goods with purchasing decisions. In this study we examine how 3D
corresponding value with the seller. Unlike traditional in store visualizations, particularly 360° and pseudo 3D turnable views
shopping, online shopping is not constrained by the distance or affect the consumers’ engagement, value perception and
time, giving more control over to the consumer. On the other purchasing decisions depending on the smoothness of
hand consumers have to rely on limited visual modalities visualization under different methods of access (computer or
consisting of text and 2D graphical images or videos of mobile). We explore the possible way to help improve e-
products and they are unable to feel, touch or manipulate the commerce offerings with the proposed 360 view as an
products through the web interfaces. Because of this limitation alternative to other enhancements being used at present such as
the consumer affordance for exploring a product that they wish video footage of the product or augmented virtual models.

978-1-5090-6491-5/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE

 This paper is arranged in following order: Section II
provides related work relevant background literature for the
research. Section III briefly presents the research questions of
the study while Section IV describes the research methodology
followed in detail. In this section the paper explains the
experiment carried out, the implementation of prototype e-
commerce site, and the data collection tasks. Section V and VI
presents the results received, statistical analysis carried out to
evaluate the research hypotheses, and the discussion on the
findings. Finally, Section VII, conclusion, concludes the paper
by appreciating the research contributions, possible future
extensions and limitations.

II. BACKGROUND
It has been known that giving consumers control over
information positively affect the purchase intentions and
product understanding [2]. The 3d product visualizations are
supposed to provide just that giving the control to user to
explore the product. This has been further proven in [3] and
they suggest allowing consumers to navigate and view
information on any part of a product. Consumers interacting
with such products are more likely to experience an increased
sense of presence [4], [5]. Fig. 1. Two types of 360° views tested in the experiments and their degrees
of freedom in control.
Interacting with an online shopping environment is affected
by a number of cognitive factors. Also interactive 3D products
arouse past experience, memories and feelings of consumers
and provide a positive sensory experience [6]. It has been
found that while interacting with 3D product visualization,
consumers use almost all of their senses [7]. 3D product
visualization can easily support for multi-modal interaction
beyond traditional static 2D content based user interactions.
Having more than one modality enables the user to perceive the
product information closer to the real world as they would have
experienced with the real artefact.
One research [8] has evaluated the relationship between
novelty to 3D product presentations and attitude toward the
presented products and their websites. They have done an
experiment with two sample groups where subjects were
shown a computer desk product presented in 3D. First group
was shown only that product and the other group was first
shown four other 3D depicted products before showing the
desk product. The results showed no significant effect of
novelty toward product attitude. But all subjects have reported
that they would like to view products in 3D in future indicating
a preferable experience.
Another research [9] has investigated the effects of
interactive image technology (IIT) in which the view can
Fig. 2. Automated 3D and 360 degree photography apparatus examples
change the product’s angle and viewing distance. Using an (http://orbitvu.com and https://www.ortery.com)
empirical study they have found out that this technology allows
the customers to gather accurate and complete information Another research [1] has found out that interactive
about a product and results in increased instrumental value. In a visualizations of 3D modeled products are only useful for
later study [10] it has been suggested that higher level of IIT products that can be customized (colors, parts). For other
such as virtual 3D models are suitable for online apparel products, consumers attitude was that there are not showing a
retailers to improve consumer perception and shopping realistic presentation of the product. The researchers have also
experience. Today we see virtual model fitting with different found out that the consumers have a more favorable attitude
perspectives that support users to decide on their clothes and towards 360° pseudo 3D views due to the realism and the
accessories purchase online. interaction possibilities.
 There have been researches on how effects of 3D product IV. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
presentations vary with demographic factors. In [11],
researches claim that females perceive the effects of animated A. Experiment 1
3D products better than males possibly due to animated For the experiment purpose a responsive website that looks
graphics’ ability to shorten females’ learning curve and also similar to a typical e-commerce website was designed and
due to the females’ ability to understand nonverbal information developed. Six products were chosen including shoes, bags and
better than males. The same research also shows that higher the accessories in a way to balance interested gender group. Each
education level of the consumer, lower the effect product product was listed in the website without prices in three
presentation has. formats with the same textual description but with different
3D model building for products is a task that needs to be product previews. In one format three images were shown as in
skillfully handled. If the 3D views to be created without special a typical e-commerce website and in other two formats 360°
tools one has to take a series of photographs of the product turnable previews made up of 12 and 24 actual images were
with slightly different orientations; these photos need to be shown. The 24 image 360° preview was smoother to turn than
fused together to generate 3D model with 360 degree view. its 12 image version due to high information condensed in the
However, there is specially designed equipment available for 360° preview. All the images were similar in size and textual
the same purpose. Some of these are high precision 3D descriptions were approximately similar in length. Brand
scanners whereas others are generic 3D model creation names were removed from textual descriptions and images to
apparatus. If the product rendered in 3D model with 360 degree eliminate the familiarity with brand as factor effecting the user
view online is of high value such as jewelry, wrist watches, decision. Fig. 3 shows example product pages used in the
hand crafts, antiques, etc. then the effort and investment in experiment.
making those 3D models with high precision pays back as 310 persons aged between 19 and 32 years participated in
buyers need to be better equipped with enough information to this experiment. 65% of the participants had some kind of
make their purchasing decision. On the other hand for regular previous online shopping experience. The participants were
commodities with low selling price and profit margin such as randomly assigned to three sample groups corresponding to the
everyday groceries, some food items etc. both buyer and seller three product formats we designed and were shown the six
often settle for standard form of product display online; in such products in random order. The first group served as the control
cases 3D views are not widely used. group and shown products with three image formats while the
Although not directly applicable, another related area of 3D second and third groups were shown the product with 360°
based merchandise is the augmentation of products with 3D previews made up of 12 and 24 images, respectively. 79
product models through augmented reality. Augmented reality participants used smartphones to participate in the experiment
with 3D product information is researched and widely used in while others used laptops and desktop computers.
mostly in product stores with wearable devices or through the
smartphone. These are done as either marker based [12] or B. Experiment 2
marker less through feature identification [13]. Augmented Similar to the first experiment two products were shown in
reality can introduce several advantages for physical store the created e-commerce website in two formats, one with three
based product exploration; for e-commerce there should be image previews and the other with 3D turnable preview consist
careful design to avoid redundancies from web based of 36 actual photos. Unlike the 360° preview this 3D turnable
information presentation and augmented 3D models, which we preview allowed rotating the preview along both horizontal and
consider beyond the scope of this study, however. vertical axes providing two degrees of freedom in control.
Textual descriptions and other settings were as stated in the
III. RESEARCH QUESTIONS first experiment.
Whereas the consumers experience of 3D product 91 persons aged between 16 and 36 years participated in
presentations are already discussed in literature, how the this experiment; 67% of the participants had previous online
method of access (mobile, computer) or the quality of shopping experience. Similar to the first experiment
visualization affect this experience is yet to be researched. participants were randomly assigned to two sample groups and
Furthermore the effect of 3D product presentation on the shown products in corresponding format. 25 participants used
consumer purchase decisions and value perception is also not smartphones to participate in the experiment while others used
researched. Therefore this study raises two important research laptops and desktop computers.
questions to examine the above unexplored research areas.
In both experiments time spent by each subject interacting
1) What effects the methods of accessibility (mobile, with each product was measured and after viewing each
computer) and quality of 3D product visualization have on user product they were asked to report their opinion about the
experience? product by answering a set of questions. These questions
covered attitude about the product presentation, perceived
2) Do 3D product presentations and relevant degree of
value of the product, likelihood of purchasing and the
freedom in control have an impact on consumer’s purchase
satisfaction level with the page loading time. To detect the
decisions or value perception?
perceived value, subjects were asked the maximum amount
The research methodology to answer these and the findings they would pay for each item. For other three measures, their
are presented in the remaining sections of the paper. feedback was recorded on a 1-10 scale.
 (a) (b)

Fig. 3. Screenshots of product pages of the demo ecommerce site created for the experiment. (a) Typical 2D images format (b) 3D interactive format

V. RESULTS AND EVALUATION

A. Analysis of Experiment 1Findings

The results of first experiment showed a significant
(p<0.05) difference of attitudes toward the product presentation
depending on the format products presented on computer. It
was found that participants have a favorable attitude towards
products when they are displayed using 360° view than the
typical 2D image format. Interestingly, the favorable attitude
was higher for 360° views made up of 12 images than 24
images.
In a similar pattern, perceived value of all six products (Fig.
4) significantly (p<0.05) increased on computer for products
displayed in 360° view with mean values of Rs.3338.55 for 12
Fig. 4. Mean perceived values of each product on computer in experiment 1.
image set and Rs. 2541.90 for 24 image set, compared to the
mean value of Rs.2165.70 for typical 2D image format. Most
notably results showed that products presented in 360° view
with 24 images significant increase the likelihood of
purchasing compared to other two formats.
Although the actual page loading speed for products with
360° view is slower, the participants were more satisfied with
loading speed of the products with 12 image 360° view than
products with normal presentation. This is probably due to the
perceived satisfaction and value of seeing a 3D presentation
without a noticeable loading delay. However, for 24 image
360° view based page showed a less satisfaction level in this
case than the other two formats. No significant difference in the
time spent engaging with products could be detected from the
results.
Fig. 5. Comparison of consumer attitude toward product presentation,
Results from the participants using mobile phones showed likelihood of purchase and loading speed between each test case.
a similar pattern in perceived value as in the previous case
where a significant increase could be identified for product
presented in 360° view. No significant differences for attitude B. Analysis of Experiment 2 Findings
toward products or interaction time between the sample groups From the results of the second experiment, it was found out
were found. However, mobile users were less satisfied, that the 3D product presentation with 2 degrees of freedom in
(significant as p < 0.05) with the page loading time of 24 image control did not improve the user experience or value of the
360° views compared to the normal product presentations. 27% product as expected on computers. In fact the subjects who
of the subjects were not satisfied with the loading time viewed the product in the 3D format have reported a significant
compared to others. less likelihood of purchasing compared to the subjects who
viewed products in normal format. Among the participants who
were using mobile phones attitude toward 3D product Furthermore, a positive effect was expected from providing
presentation was negative. Still the perceived value of products two degrees of freedom in controlling the 3D product
presented in 3D view showed a significant increase with a presentation, but the results were implying quite the contrary
mean value of Rs.2672.08 compared to the mean value of on both computers and mobile phones. The specific reasons for
Rs.1782.80 of products presented in normal format. Fig. 6 this observation are unclear based on the findings of this study
presents the comparison of perceived value between computer and it is possible that difficulty of controlling the 3D scene
and mobile based users measured as mean value spent in Rs. with mouse or touch input is affecting the user experience.
In this experiment participants reported no significant However the study indicates an increase in perceived value
difference of satisfaction level regarding the page loading time of products with the degree of freedom provided on mobile
or time spent interacting with the product in both cases. phones. To make use of this positive effect, careful user
experience design will be required to provide better interaction
methods and to help with the steep learning curve. The results
also suggest that the loading time of 3D presentations is a
concern for the mobile users. To reduce this overhead, image
compression techniques can be used and the number of image
frames in the visualization can be dynamically adjusted
according to network speed, and the phone resource level. It is
important to improve the consumer experience for mobile users
as the percentage of mobile shoppers is rapidly increasing
globally and about to surpass the percentage of laptop/desktop
shoppers.
Although an increase in user engagement time with 3D
presented products was expected, both the experiments show
no significant difference. It is possible that as suggested in
[15], allowing the product to be viewed in 3D results in fast
Fig. 6. Comparison of mean perceived values between computer and mobile reasoning and better understanding by the consumer thus
users in experiment 2. reducing the engagement time.

VI. DISCUSSION VII. CONCLUSION

These two experiments suggest that 3D product The goal of this research was to study the effects of
presentations have interesting positive and negative effects on interactive 3D product presentations using actual images on the
consumer’s shopping experience and purchase decisions. The consumer experience and purchase decisions in e-commerce
results shows that consumers have a favorable attitude toward environments. It was found out that 3D 360° view
3D product presentation using 360° actual photos when they presentations are most sensible for consumers accessing
are viewed on a computer, agreeing with the results of previous through computers where they perceive an increased product
studies [1]. This effect also supports the idea of perceptual value, better consumer experience and most importantly, more
curiosity [14] that is the consumers’ desire for novel perceptual likely to purchase. The research did find some mixed effect of
stimulation, which results in the pleasure and emotional arousal 360° view on mobile phone users. One challenge for mobile
in the consumer mind thereby having a subsequent effect on users to explore 3D 360° view could be the lack of support they
purchase intentions. get for touch based figure movements while holding the device
at their hands. Appropriate gestures that generate less fatigue
Interestingly this study suggests that consumers perceive can be used to let these users experience with the 360° view.
more value in a product presented in 360° view format and With careful user experience design, those negative effects can
they are more likely to be purchased. What this implies is when be minimized to yield the positive effect of increased perceived
a product is presented in such format with a price specified, value in consumers. Since mobile phones are becoming the
consumers will feel like the price is cheaper and as a better dominant platform for online shopping, it is worthwhile to
deal, compared to the same product presented normally. Thus further research on that matter.
they are more likely to purchase the product. This is a key
finding that can be used to improve conversion rate of online Having smoother visualizations with more image frames
shopping websites. also indicates higher likelihood of product being purchased at
the cost of slight reduction of some positive effects. Thus we
Having smoother visualizations with more image frames suggest using 24 images per 360° view to balance the user
indicated mixed effects on consumers. Page loading time experience and purchase rate.
increases with the number of image frames and thus the
decrease of satisfaction regarding the loading speed with Providing an additional degree of freedom in control seems
smoother visualizations is understandable (as summarized in to complicate the handling of the 3D 360° view and negatively
Fig. 5). Still the positive effect of increased likelihood of affect the consumers although an increase in the perceived
purchase with smoother visualizations might worth the cost of value could be identified. Further research is required to study
slightly increased loading time. this and find a better interaction model to make use of that
positive effect.
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