The purpose of this paper was to provide an overview of the existing literature on online visual merchandising and to propose an alternative theoretical framework in which online visual merchandising research can be conducted. Two streams of research including the e-tail service quality literature and the store environment literature from environmental psychology perspectives were reviewed in the context of online visual merchandising. An impression formation paradigm from social psychology was adopted to establish the alternative framework to supplement the existing online visual merchandising research and generate deeper insights into the online visual merchandising phenomenon.