Ecommerce sites' mobile templates hide information that shoppers use to save money

In Do Consumers Make Less Accurate Decisions When They Use Mobiles?, a study by researchers at Ben Gurion University accepted for presentation at next month's International Conference on Information Systems in Munich, the researchers seek to discover why consumers spend more money on ecommerce sites when using mobile devices than when they use laptops and other, larger screens.

Specifically, the researchers are trying to determine whether small screen size is the dispositive factor, or whether there is something specific about mobile templates that gooses online spending. Smaller screens do typically result in some information being hidden or omitted, but it's not clear whether any omission would produce worse bargains for shoppers, or whether the specific, deliberate choices that ecommerce sites make when designing their mobile templates bring about this result.

They conducted laboratory experiments in which the information available to shoppers was varied, and found that there was no reason that the information necessary for comparison shopping couldn't be presented, even on small screens -- and that that information was present, shoppers got better deals on hotel rooms.

The authors don't offer any guesses as to why sites' designers chose to omit information that led to their customers getting better bargains and spending less. There's an obvious interpretation -- that the sellers know which information leads to better outcomes for shoppers, and they adjust the sites' templates accordingly so that they make more while shoppers get less.

But there's another explanation that is, in its own way, more revealing: the designers might simply have tried a variety of A/B split design experiments whose success was measured in how much shoppers spent, without interrogating where the excess revenue was coming from. Read the rest