Abstract

When sellers auction items on the online auction sites, such as Yahoo! Auction and eBay, they face the dilemma of whether to incur additional monetary cost for better placement and/or emphasis of the items. The purpose of this research is to take a step towards developing an understanding of the effects of the visual cues, in more general terms graphical formats, on auction outcomes. Preliminary measures about the effect of visual cues on the auction outcomes were developed through empirical data collection from Yahoo! Auction. Surveying the Internet auction sites indicates the presence of two commonly found visual cues: Featured listing (i.e. offers that are placed at the beginning of a page), and highlight (i.e. the offers that are being emphasized through an addition of visually pleasing background color). In exploring how each of these visual cues is related to the auction outcomes, we found that few of the cues appeared to increase the number of bids, which is actually the proxy to demand of the bided item. Very often, the seller’s perceived value of item being listed under featured listing and/or item being highlighted failed to justify for the additional cost of having them. One explanation for this amazing result is that majority of the buyers may be bargain hunters and the overwhelming number of items possesses visual cues that resulted in the lost of scannability. As such, buyers tend to engage in extensive search for offers that are better in perceived quality, lower in cost or both, and may totally disregard the visual cues. The finding suggests that design interface theories should attempt to account for the nature of the application, buyer search behavior, and how the visual cues should be priced. It is not necessarily true that visually attractive or pleasing feature may yield favorable buyers’ responses.

Download

Share

COinS