Online Consumer's Impulse Buying Behaviour

Impulse buying is a phenomenon that has received considerable attention from marketing researchers,psychologist,marketing managers,policy makers and has been studied extensively in an offline setting.There is preliminary evidence that this behavior is rampant in an online setting.With the proliferation of electronic commerce,there is both a need and opportunity to examine impulse buying in an online setting.Impulse pur-chase occurs when a consumer experiences a sudden,habitually powerful,and insistent urge to buy something.Online impulse buying has drawn increasingly scholarly attentions across disciplines.Online impulse buying,as an unplanned purchasing decision,is influences by several factors such as hedonic motivations,utilitarian motivations,website quality,perceived usefulness,perceived ease of use,perceived enjoyment,visual appeal information,urge to buy impulsively,scarcity and serendipity.The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the impact of website quality,use of credit card,sales promotion,hedonic and utilitarian motivations,perceived usefulness,perceived ease of use,scarcity and serendipity on online impulse buying.Furthermore,we investigate the moderating role of sales promotion and use of credit card in the relationship between website quality and online impulse buying.The five dimensions of hedonic shopping value assess the moderating role of social shopping,adventure shopping,idea shopping,value shopping and relaxation shopping in the relationship between two situational factors(scarcity and serendipity)and online impulse buying in Chinese social commerce environment.An online and personal survey from 2000 online shoppers belonging to four big cities of China-Beijing,Shanghai,Tianjin and Nanjing-was conducted.A random sampling and convenience sampling techniques was utilized for data collection.Data were analyzed using validity(discriminant and convergent)and reliability tests,missing value treatment,common bias method,variance inflation factor,exploratory factor analysis,confirmatory factor analysis and structure equation modeling.Furthermore,three step moderation analysis was utilized.All statistical tests were generated by SPSS and AMOS version 20.All data were collected under two environments i.e.,Chinese e-commerce and social commerce.Few major findings discovered are:the website quality positively affects the online impulse buying;sales promotion significantly influences online impulse buying and acts as a strong moderator on the relationship between website quality and online impulse buying;online impulse purchases are positively influenced by use of credit card,and the use of credit card enhances the relationship between website quality and online impulse buying.The findings demonstrated that both emotional(perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness)and motivational(hedonic web browsing and utilitarian web browsing)factors have a strong and positive influence online impulse buying.Perceived ease of use has less influence on OIB compared to other variables.Furthermore,the results confirm that two situational factors(scarcity and serendipity)positively influence the online impulse buying among Chinese online shoppers in social commerce environment.Four dimensions of hedonic shopping value(social shopping,relaxation shopping,adventure shopping and idea shopping)positively moderate in the relationship between serendipity and OIB;value shopping is insignificant with moderation effect.Interestingly,idea shopping was found insignificant moderating role in the relationship between scarcity and OIB;other four dimensions of hedonic shopping value(social shopping,adventure shopping,value shopping and relaxation shopping)positively moderate in the relationship between scarcity and OIB.The scope of this study remains limited to the Chinese market and a sample set of 2000 online consumers.We collect data from four cities of China-Beijing,Tianjin,Nanjing and Shanghai.However,the findings propose that in order to stimulate OIB among consumers,online retailers should improve their website quality,develop promotional strategies,and promote the use of credit cards.The finding is helpful to the online retailers and social commerce web developers by recommending them to take the scarcity and serendipity in their consideration.These factors have the potential to motivate the consumers to initiate the hedonic shopping aptitude to urge to buy impulsively.This study provides a deep insight of e-shoppers toward online impulse behavior in the field of Chinese e-commerce and social commerce industry that can be generalized to other countries.To the best of our knowledge,this study is first to discover the dynamics of online impulse buying behavior with motivational and emotional predictors with regard to the biggest online shopping festival in China.Unlike the previous work which remained unsuccessful in in cooperating all factors into one study,this study has incorporated irrational and unplanned consumption along with rational and planned one in the same research.Implications for scholars and e-tail managers of our study are discussed.