An Analysis of Visual and Presentation Factors Influencing the Design of E-commerce Web Sites

Two important factors which indirectly influence the Internet shoppers to make some online purchases are the visual layout and the presentation of web page. In this paper, we propose an approach of web page layout analysis in order to assess the design of e-commerce Web sites. Firstly, our proposed method segments each web page into five different blocks: top, left, center, right and bottom. We study three main feature types: spatial, location and presentation, which effect the design of each page. The spatial feature set includes the width-length ratio and relative area of each block while the location feature set is the appearance positions of e-commerce components such as navigation, product index and customer service. The presentation feature set represents page characteristic and navigation menu format that appear on the page or block such as navigator style, menu type, image alignment and text density. To perform the experiments, we consider the top 100 Internet retailers as ranked by the Internet Retailerpsilas Top 500 Guide. We adopt classification algorithms in order to construct a model from the top Web sites against other 100 randomly selected e-commerce Web sites. The experimental results showed that the model which is constructed based on the presentation feature set yields better performance than using the spatial and location feature sets.