# Webcam Eye Tracking for Monitoring Visual Attention in Hypothetical Online Shopping Tasks
###### Abstract  
Online retailers are challenged to present their products in an appropriate way to attract customers' attention. To test the impact of product presentation features on customers' visual attention, webcam eye tracking might be an alternative to infrared eye tracking, especially in situations where face-to-face contact is difficult. The aim of this study was to examine whether webcam eye tracking is suitable for investigating the influence of certain exogenous factors on customers' visual attention when visiting online clothing shops. For this purpose, screenshots of two websites of two well-known online clothing retailers were used as stimuli. Linear regression analyses were conducted to determine the influence of the spatial position and the presence of a human model on the percentage of participants visiting a product depiction. The results show that products presented by human models and located in the upper middle area of a website were visited by more participants. From this, we were able to derive recommendations for optimising product presentation in online clothing shops. Our results fit well with those of other studies on visual attention conducted with infrared eye tracking, suggesting that webcam eye tracking could be an alternative to infrared eye tracking, at least for similar research questions.  
webcam eye tracking; gaze behaviour; online clothing retail; spatial position; human model; website +
Footnote †: journal: Medicalof eye tracking systems that require only a webcam and software to record gaze behaviour and thus are not bound to laboratories and specific eye tracking devices. Although webcam eye tracking is considered a promising method that has the potential to transform usability and market research [8], only an extremely limited number of scientific studies exist that employed this method. These studies provide initial evidence that webcam eye tracking might be an alternative to infrared eye tracking, but without any specific reference to market research questions [8,9].  
With this study, we contribute to the literature by applying webcam eye tracking to a specific market research question. The aim is to investigate the simultaneous influence of different design elements of an online shop on the visual attention of potential customers and, based on the results, to assess whether webcam eye tracking could be suitable for this kind of research. We focus on the clothing retail sector as an example, since clothing belongs to the top-selling product groups online, accounting for more than a quarter on the B2C e-commerce turnover in Germany in 2020 [10]. Taking websites of two well-known online clothing retailers, three design-related (exogenous) factors that might influence customers' visual attention on these websites are investigated:  
* Horizontal position of the product on the online shop's website;
* Vertical position of the product on the online shop's website;
* Product picture displaying the clothes worn by a person vs. product picture displaying only the clothes.  
Although the above exogenous factors have been shown to have an impact on visual attention during website visits, to the best of our knowledge there has not yet been a study that examines the impact of all three factors on visual attention during an online shopping task simultaneously, nor has there been a study doing this using webcam eye tracking. In this paper, we close this research gap by analysing the visual attention of 20 potential customers to products in online clothing shops via webcam eye tracking. Statistical analysis shows that the spatial position and the presentation of the clothes by a human model influenced visual attention in a way that is largely consistent with the existing literature, suggesting that webcam eye tracking could be a suitable tool for capturing visual attention.