Abstract:
An exploratory study was conducted to understand the influences of different
marketing stimuli in fashion retail websites on impulse buying, reflecting
customer eye movements. Both previous research and existing theoretical
applications, such as TAM (Technology Acceptance Model), have no significant
reflections on the respective study. This led to identifying empirical and
theoretical gaps in understanding the research problem as “there is no a scientific
study conducted to analyse web-based customer eye movement on impulse
decisions in the Sri Lankan fashion retail sector”. The research methodology was
guided by the interpretivist paradigm. Twenty (20) structured interviews were
conducted to collect data displaying three (03) sample websites under the
application of an eye-tracking tool. The duration of an eye-tracking session was
30 seconds per website, which is more than 3 times of modern customer
attention span. The respective websites are categorised as high, medium & low
graded based on features, appearance, and navigational quality. The thematic
analysis revealed that eye movement indicated hedonic features, such as colours
used in websites, quality of pictures and graphics, simplicity of websites and
promoting influence to emerge impulse customer decision making in fashion
retail sector. The study is significant as the scientific understanding of the eye
movements of web surfers is required to realise how hedonic influences of web
stimuli emerge in impulse buying. The study proposed to develop a conceptual
model leading to project impulse buying in a web-based shopping environment
referring to eye-tracking observations.
