The design of product listing pages is a key component of Website design because it has significant influence on the sales volume on a Website. This study focuses on product placement in designing product listing pages. Product placement concerns how venders of online stores place their products over the product listing pages for maximization of profit. This problem is very similar to the offline shelf management problem. Since product information sources on a Web page are typically communicated through the text and image, visual stimuli such as color, shape, size, and spatial arrangement often have an effect on the visual attention of online shoppers and, in turn, influence their eventual purchase decisions. In view of the above, this study synthesizes the visual attention literature and theory of shelf-space allocation to develop a mathematical programming model with genetic algorithms for finding optimal solutions to the focused issue. The validity of the model is illustrated with example problems. 1. Introduction With the increasing prevalence of the Internet and advancement of information technologies, online stores which offer more convenience and wider diversity of products have gradually become an alternative shopping destination for consumers. In response to this change in consumer habits, many vendors have invested in an online store to seize potential opportunities in the online shopping market. According to 2011 E-Stats, US retailers reported e-commerce sales of $194 billion in 2011, an increase of 16.4 percent from a revised $167 billion in 2010. Total sales increased by 7.7 percent to $4.1 trillion in 2011 from a revised $3.8 trillion in 2010 [1]. Given its enormous potential, improving users’ online shopping experiences has become a major theme in industrial research [2, 3]. Research discovered that whether a user finds a Website visually appealing often has a powerful impact on forming user’s perception of Website usability and the perception of Web pages as usable can keep users from moving away from the Website [4, 5]. Thus, Websites design is of great importance to online stores [6]. The design of product listing pages is a key component of Website design because it has significant influence on the traffic and sales volume on a Website [7]. A typical product listing page contains the name of products, brand names, prices, and often images of the products. For each product category, products are often displayed in a list or an array presentation format. The users compare different alternative products and make choices on which product
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