Influence of Website Design on Consumer Emotion and Purchase Intention in Travel Websites

Abstract

This work presents the results of three studies that investigated the influence of website design on consumer emotion and purchase intention in travel websites with the use of the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) model. The first two studies addressed how the website's background color and picture layout can influence consumer emotion and purchase intention, whereas the third study investigated the influence of the size and quantity of pictures on consumer emotion and purchase intention. The results demonstrated that consumer emotion is more positive toward buying online from travel websites that are designed with warm colors and with layouts having such feature as left-hand side images and right-hand side text, along with a few large pictures. Additionally, the results also showed that consumer emotion has a positive influence on purchase intention in a travel website. These results suggested that sellers and managers should improve the design of travel websites to stimulate consumer emotion and purchase intention.