When does beauty matter? Aesthetic design as a catalyst in advance selling

The online retail market is highly competitive, with many retailers offering products that exhibit similar functionalities. To stimulate sales and differentiate their products, retailers have widely adopted marketing strategies including product aesthetics and advance selling. However, their interaction remains insufficiently understood. Drawing on Construal Level Theory and the Heuristic-Systematic Model, this research investigates when (across advance vs. spot selling; for utilitarian vs. hedonic products) and how product aesthetics influences consumer evaluations. Results from three online experiments and one eye-tracking experiment demonstrate that product aesthetics boosts consumer evaluations in advance selling, but not in spot selling contexts. This interaction is observed only for utilitarian products. For hedonic products, product aesthetics consistently enhances consumer evaluations. Eye-tracking reveals that aesthetics reduces the processing degree of functional information, mediating its effect. Our research advances the aesthetics and e-commerce literature by revealing the activation of a heuristic-substitution pathway through which advance selling enables aesthetics to influence evaluation, distinguishing between aesthetics as a core value cue for hedonic products and as a contextually activated cue for utilitarian products, and demonstrating how the advance selling features shift the processing of aesthetic versus functional product information. This research offers actionable insights for strategically aligning aesthetics with selling modes in online retail.