Morrisons’ recent sales figures made for grim reading. With a reduction in almost 6%, the company is hoping the online venture it has just launched will bring in new sales.

Morrisons has clearly spent time learning how to display foods and maximise customers’ interests with its Market Street. But online all it will have to work with is a flat, two-dimensional image. There’s no texture or smell. The shopper cannot pick it up, squeeze it and get a sense of the weight.

And it gets worse. In the “real world”, retailers like Morrisons can control environmental variables known to encourage shopping - such as temperature and lighting. The mists of moist cold air flowing over fresh salads catch the eye by making the food look fresher.

Online, though, Morrisons cannot do this in fact it has no control of the environment in which the online shopper engages with its site. Indeed, evidence suggests many people shop on their mobiles while sitting on the loo!

So what can you do to make online foodstuff enticing? The emerging science of ‘click.ology’, looking at what makes people click online, reveals some interesting ways in which you can get more people to buy food online.

One key element, it seems, is not the pictures at all but the words. Words can trigger sensory responses if used well. So descriptions need to convey the sense of smell, texture and taste that will trigger those taste buds and get shoppers salivating.

The position of items on a web page is also important. People tend to see the passage of time going from left to right and research shows that when images on web pages are positioned to reflect this, people buy more. Therefore, food ingredient pictures placed on the left with images of the finished dish on the right, for instance, make logical sense to our concept of time and make a purchase more likely.

In short, producing web pages that make food look enticing and encourages shoppers to buy takes more than just good design. Understanding the psychology of online shoppers and what makes them click is vital.

Graham Jones is an internet psychologist and the author of Click.ology