An Experimental Research On Factors Influencing Consumers’ Online Impulse Buying

With the rapid development of economy and the improvement of people’s income, growing numbers of consumers turn to emotional consumption from rational consumption. Buying a product is no longer the result of a thoughtful and careful consideration, but a consequence of sudden impulse. As a ubiquitous consumer behavior, impulse buying has been widely studied by scholars in the field of marketing, economics, psychology and others. And there also has a fruitful conclusions of the studies. But most of the studies are under traditional shopping mall or retail shopping environment. Studies of impulse buying based on online shopping environment are relatively few. Under online shopping environment, in order to capture customer to increase sales, due to the difference between online and offline environment (such as customer can not touch or try the product), merchants need to take steps that is totally different from that of traditional environment. So, what are the factors that affect customers’ impulse buying under online shopping environment? In this regard, there is still a lack of theoretical and empirical study, which could provide effective guidance to online merchants. Based upon this, this study attempts to explore the factors that affect customers’ impulse buying online by empirical study and provide marketing guidance to online merchants.Based on previous literatures, depth interviews and pre-investigations,24factors that may affect consumer’s online impulse buying are abstracted. Through exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis, these24factors are grouped into six categories. Calculating and weighting these six categories based on the principal component analysis. Highest to lowest, these six categories are price-off promotions, comprehensive shopping commitment, good transaction records, high-quality interactive services, good website design and detailed product description. Independent sample T test and one-way ANOVA show that factors influencing consumers’ online impulse buying have certain difference between consumers of different gender and age, but no difference exists between frequency of buying goods online and education background, consumers of different gender has significant diverse of category of goods under online impulse buying.