What Should a Cover Picture Cover? Understanding the Impact of Different Categories of Photos on Sales with Evidence from a Daily-deal Platform

Merchants typically display pictures of their brand names and logos, product descriptions, and service environment on online platforms. In most cases, each merchant is allowed to showcase a single photo in consumers’ search results. This first visual presentation is the merchant’s cover picture, one of the most important marketer-generated visual content on online platforms. Extant literature shows that each category of photos—brand names/logos, product descriptions, and service environment—can affect consumers’ behaviors. However, it is unclear whether and how these different categories affect merchants’ sales. In this paper, we investigate the impact of three categories of cover pictures (i.e., brand, product, and environment) on merchants’ sales performance in the context of a leading daily-deal platform and understand how two aspects of these photos—content (i.e., the focal objects/elements) and composition (i.e., the arrangement of content)—affect sales. The results indicate that displaying the brand category of cover pictures may generate higher sales than the other two categories. On one hand, the surplus of sales is associated with the brand category’s intrinsic advantage of composition. On the other hand, franchised merchants (chain stores) can improve their sales by displaying brand names and logos, as franchises have higher brand awareness than non-franchises. Moreover, we observe the significance of content and composition in new merchants’ cover pictures when they launch new businesses. This work enriches the understanding of the effects of marketer-generated visual content on online retailing and highlights the importance of the brand category of cover pictures on merchants’ sales.