An Optimization Model for Product Placement on Product Listing Pages

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.