“I Feel Like Shopping Today…”: An Analysis of External and Situational Factors toward Impulse Online Buying Decision among College-Age Customers

Abstract. In the past few decades, technology has undoubtedly changed, especially in information technology. For instance, the smartphone is now one of the most used and essential electronics for people right now because people from any generations use the smartphone. They use it not only for taking photos or messaging but also for browsing or even online shopping. Because of the easiness to access everything, they are exposed to a lot of information. Customers who used to go to the mall to buy clothes now can just quickly browse the dresses from the website. In several simple steps, it is on its way to the customers. This leads to new behaviour, which is online impulse buying behaviour. According to Dawson and Kim (2009), impulse buying is supported by someone’s affective and cognitive response to purchase on impulse. Not only that but also the external factors like discounts and web quality (Swarnalatha and Soundhariya, 2018) and situational factors like time and money availability (Beatty and Ferrell, 1998) influence the customers. Among all customers, Generation Z is now the most significant target market as they are currently at a productive age. The main objective of this research is to see which factors between external and situational that have the most substantial influence on online impulse buying behaviour among Generation Z aged 18-24 years. For this research, a survey questionnaire was administered to 400 respondents. Reliability and validity test, classical assumption test, descriptive analysis, correlation analysis, and multiple linear regression are used to analyze the data. The results show that external factors and situation factors both influence online impulse buying. But, situational factors have a stronger impact on online impulse buying compared to external factors. These findings might enable companies to develop an effective marketing strategy.Keywords: online impulse buying behaviour; external factors; situational factors; Generation Z