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Top1. Introduction
Merchandise display is the first contact between the retailer and the customer. With the visual effect of the merchandise display design, it directly stimulates the purchase intention of the customer to achieve the purpose of promoting sales. For physical retail, shelves are important platforms for merchandise display. Well-managed shelf space can improve the return on inventory investment, raise consumer satisfaction by reducing out-of-stock occurrences, and increase sales and profit margins (Yang, 2001). As a result, the issue of shelf-space allocation has attracted much attention of both marketing and operations research scholars over the past decades (e.g., Corstjens & Doyle, 1981; Borin et al., 1994; Lim et al., 2004; Amrouche & Zaccour, 2007; Hansen et al., 2010; Castelli & Vanneschi, 2014; Hübner & Schaal, 2016).
In recent years, with the popularization of the Internet and the advancement of information technology, online stores offering lower prices, more conveniences, and more extensive products have gradually replaced physical stores as a new type of marketing channel. Some physical stores even are only used as offline consumer experiences, and all transactions are requested to complete online. In response to this change, many retailers have invested in online stores to capture the potential opportunities in the online-shopping market. According to the German Statista data, the global retail e-commerce sales increased from 1.336 trillion US dollars in 2014 to 2.304 trillion U.S. dollars in July 2017, a growth rate of nearly 70%, and it is predicted that in 2021 global retail e-commerce sales will reach 4.878 trillion US dollars (Statista Website, 2018). With the trend of consumers’ shopping channels gradually shifting from physical stores to online stores, how to display merchandise through the webpages and respond quickly to customer needs has become a topic for modern retailers.