Multimodal Message Incongruence on E-Commerce Websites

This study investigates the impact of incongruence between visual and text-based information about a product provided by sellers on e-commerce websites. We hypothesize that the incongruence between the quantity presented in a visual representation and a text-based description will produce a negative effect on the product evaluation of customers. Two pilot studies provide initial evidence to support this hypothesis. This result suggests that the effect needs to be further investigated with higher level of sophistication both in terms of theory and empirical support. While it is generally encouraged to maintain design-level consistency in multi-modal communication setting, e-commerce researchers and practitioners have not perfected the mechanisms to respond to message-level incongruence issue. By adopting dual process theories of thinking, when completed, this study will provide a detailed theoretical account of how incongruence between visual representation and linguistic descriptions would affect customers’ evaluation of a product selling online.