Online Shopping and the Problem with Pictures

What if the thing that gets online shoppers to buy a product is also the thing that makes them dissatisfied with the product when it arrives?

In a recent research project, I tested this hypothesis using the pictures of products that accompany the online shopping experience. Images are the crux of online shopping. Good pictures &#8212 even interactive ones that allow shoppers to see the product from every angle and in every color combination possible — help consumers feel confident in their purchase decision. It’s what gets them to buy.

But with online shopping, after the purchase comes the wait, the time it takes the product to ship through the mail. According to my research, retailers should be more worried about this waiting period than they currently are. Here’s why: When consumers purchase items online, often they’ll print a receipt. They might pin the picture on their bulletin board or keep it on their desk. The retailer has no control over the quality of this image. It could be printed in black and white or an a lower-end inkjet printer, the colors of which are not nearly as sharp as what’s displayed on a screen.

It turns out that both these types of pictures seem to affect expectations during the shipping time, and can result in dissatisfied consumers.

To test this, I had research subjects buy a mug. Here’s a high-quality image of a sample mug:

I then gave them pictures of their purchased product on their printed receipt. In the first experiment, the receipts had either a low-quality color picture, typical of a home inkjet printer, or no picture at all. In another the receipts had either a black-and-white image or none at all. Here are the low-quality color image and black and white image from this experiment:

After waiting a week for the delivery of the product, the consumers who had had the low quality color picture and the black and white picture reported that they were much more dissatisfied with their product at the time of delivery as compared to consumers who had no picture. Their word-of-mouth (would they recommend the product) ratings were more negative, and intentions to make a another purchase from the vendor were reported to be much lower.

After this, I experimented with giving consumers photo-quality pictures with their receipt, images that closely matched what the person saw while shopping. This worked. Customer satisfaction improved on all three measures (overall satisfaction, word-of-mouth recommendations, and repeat purchasing).

So what’s happening here? Though more work will be needed to confirm this, it appears that the low-quality images alter a person’s memory of what they bought and shift their expectations while they wait for the purchase to show up. The high-quality, sometimes interactive images that excited the person enough to purchase are replaced by the different images in the printouts. When the product arrives, there’s some disconnect between what they’ve been imagining and what they’re looking at.

This presents something of a dilemma for online retailers. On the one hand, they need to offer extremely high-quality imagery and interaction that allows for seeing colors and other features in detail in order to motivate consumers to buy products. On the other hand, they can expect any printed out image of that purchase not to match the quality of the image that got them to buy — thus creating disappointed shoppers.

One solution appears to be to give consumers extremely high-quality images to keep with them while the product ships. But this is unrealistic for online shopping. Retailers can’t control the kind of printers consumers use and can’t tell consumers, “Don’t print out this receipt; instead keep it in your email and refer to our high-quality picture there.” (It may work for people who buy in the store and need a product shipped, since the company could control the quality of the printout.)

In one more experiment, I tested another possible solution: Providing a Photoshop-generated line drawing of the purchase. It looked like this:

The idea here is to provide enough information to allow the person to feel good about the money that they had just spent but not enough detail to allow their memory of their purchase to be altered. This is not an attempt to recreate the thing that got them to buy, but rather to represent the purchase in a more abstract way.

And this worked, too. Satisfaction, word-of-mouth, and repeat purchase scores were all higher than with the low-quality photos. For online retailers, this could be an easy, cost-effective way to improve customer satisfaction.