How Visual Framing Strategies Shape Consumer Engagement and Sales in Short-Video Commerce

Short videos have become a dominant format in digital commerce, enabling brands to engage consumers and drive purchases through dynamic and visually rich content. This highlights the need for a more nuanced understanding of visual framing strategies, that is, what elements are shown and how they are presented. Drawing on Cognitive Load Theory, this study explores the impact of visual compositional framing strategies and their dynamics on consumer engagement and sales. Applying a CNN-based deep learning model, 249,043 images (video frames) extracted from 3426 book-related short sales videos on Douyin are classified into one of three categories: functional, contextual, or social, according to the visual composition of the frame. Further econometric modeling reveals distinct effects of such framing categories: functional framing is positively associated with both engagement and sales, contextual framing relates to higher sales only, while social framing relates positively to engagement but negatively to sales. From a dynamic perspective, frequent transitions between framing types within a short video increase visual complexity, which reduces both engagement and sales and moderates the effects of specific framing strategies. These findings advance theoretical understanding of visual framing in dynamic media environments and offer practical insights for designing more effective short video content.