Factors that Influence Impulsive Buying on Social Networking Sites Platforms: The Case of Facebook for Social E-commerce

Abstract

Companies, marketers and researchers have been discovering how to encourage impulsive buying behavior for many decades now. Impulsive buying behavior has been known to count for as much as 80% of total purchases in the United States and it has been researched on how to influence and trigger the behavior into customers by many means, for example using music in a physical environment or putting products in strategic and convenient spots. Nevertheless it can be realized that internet purchasing behavior is displayed and influenced in a very different way. Recently there has been a rise of F-commerce or social e-commerce which actually embodies all other social networking sites as well but is centered on Facebook since it’s the biggest platform. To create impulsive behavior on social networking platforms, different influential factors must be used to find the right stimuli to induce customers into purchase. The exploration of these factors in the following thesis pursues the experimental method using Facebook platform. The results show that the most important characteristics are the level of likes, the emphasis and the product/model arrangement in the SNS image. The main contribution of the study is the accurate arrangement of the different image factors that create the highest impulsive buying behavior between internet users.