What Factors Impact the Online Impulse Buying Behavior in E-retail? A literature analysis

Impulse buying behaviour is one of the most commercially important forms of consumer behaviour in retail. In an online environment, consumers tend to be even more impulsive in their purchasing behaviour and given the recent exponential growth and future projections of e-commerce, the role of impulse buying behaviour becomes even more significant. Insights of this phenomenon can be used to create strategic and tactical marketing decisions in e-retail environments. Identifying the underlying factors influencing this behaviour is also crucial in order to be able to help the people suffering from compulsive shopping or other impulse control disorders. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is 1) to review and analyse the existing literature and find common trends in research, 2) to summarize the findings of previous research, and 3) to make comparison of these findings to identified factors of impulse buying offline. Methodology: The method used in this study is literature review. The comprehensive literature analysis included a set of journal articles, reviews and book chapters, extracted from Elsevier’s Scopus database and Google Scholar, which was narrowed down to the final set of 31 relevant academic articles. This final literature set was then analysed to find common trends and themes, similarities in theoretical foundation and methodology, as well as to consolidate the findings of previous literature. Findings: The most prominent theoretical foundation in the studies of this review was the stimulus-organism-response framework and the most favoured method used was online surveys. The identified motivators of online impulse buying include a total of 22 factors that were further classified into three categories: internal factors, website attributes and marketing stimuli. Originality: To the best of knowledge, this is the first paper to summarize the indentified factors of previous literature on impulse buying online by categorizing them in to internal factors, website attributes and marketing stimuli. This is the first paper to compare the factors between online and offline context. Value: This study provides future research an extensive analysis of the existing literature on to which one can use as theoretical background and as a foundation for future research on online shoppin behavior and impulse buying. The practical implications provide e-retailers with valuable consumer insights for strategic and tactical decision making regarding the development of customer-driven solutions, website design and conversion optimization. These implications could be used for the purpose of social sciences as well, against the negative consequences impulse buying reportedly may cause