| Abstract |
- Online shopping is one of the fastest growing forms of shopping with sales
reaching $141.4 billion in 2004 (Shop.org, 2005). With the tremendous growth of online
retailing, and the prevalence of impulse buying today, this study's purpose was to
investigate the internal and external factors of impulse buying in an online setting,
Internally looking at what triggers the consumer to buy impulsively, and externally
looking at what external trigger cues on retail websites encourage impulse buying.
A revised model of the Consumption Impulse Formation Enactment Model was
used in this study in the context of online shopping. Based on this model, it was
hypothesized that impulse buying tendency, affective and cognitive states, and normative
evaluations affect impulse buying decisions. It was also hypothesized that different types
of external stimuli present on a website affect the level of impulse purchase made. This study consisted of three phases. In phase one, five focus group interviews
were conducted to determine what external cues exist on apparel retailer websites that
trigger impulse buying behavior, and found four categories of cues used to create a
coding guide of external impulse trigger cues of a website. In phase two, a content
analysis of the top 99 online apparel websites was conducted to support the content
validity of the focus group information, and assess current retailers in terms of the
amount of external cues present on their websites. A correlation analysis revealed a
positive relationship between the web retailer's financial performance, and the amount of
external stimuli present on their websites that trigger impulse buying. In phase three, an
experiment was conducted with a web survey format to determine whether different types
of external impulse trigger cues affect the level of impulse purchase made. Five
conditions of mock apparel web pages were created, each representing a different type of
external impulse trigger cue (sales, promotions, ideas, and suggestions), with the fifth as
a control web page. Participants were presented with a hypothetical buying scenario
adopted from Rook and Fisher (1995) in which they had to make a purchase decision for
a girl named Mary, varying in the level of impulsiveness. Impulse buying tendency
(Rook & Fisher, 1995), affective and cognitive state (Verplanken & Herabaldi, 2001),
and normative evaluation (Rook & Fisher, 1995) were measured with previously
developed reliable scales.
ANOVA was performed and found no significant differences among the types of
external impulse trigger cues; F(299) = l.59,p > 0.177. A correlation analysis was
conducted and revealed a positive correlation between impulse buying tendency scores
and past impulse buying behavior; r = 0.394, n = 300, p < 0.00001. A positive correlation was also found between affective state and past impulse buying behavior; r = 0.154, n =
300, p < 0.01 A negative correlation was found between cognitive state and past impulse
buying behavior; r = -0.169, n = 300,p < 0.05. And last, a significant positive correlation
was found between normative evaluation and impulse purchase decisions, r= 0.14, n =
300,p < 0.05.
This study identified key external stimuli present on retailers' websites that
trigger impulse buying behavior, which no research has looked at previously. A reliable
coding guide of impulse trigger cues was also developed from this study. The positive
correlation found between retailers' web performance and the amount of cues present on
their websites, suggest that as the amount of external impulse trigger cues increase on
websites, so too do web sales. The findings from this study also suggest that internal
factors of impulse buying influence impulse buying behavior in an online setting as it
does in a traditional brick and mortar shopping context as studied in previous research.
This study thus extends the CIFE model into an online shopping context. This research
informs consumers of marketing tactics used to encourage impulse buying online.
Marketers can use this information to assess their own websites in terms of what external
stimuli to present on their websites to trigger impulse buying. Limitations in this study
include the small sample size of retailers content analyzed and the time limitation of
coding websites. This study also did not adopt the entire CIFE model to an online
shopping context which a further study is suggested to do so.
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