The situational nature of impulse buying on mobile platforms: A cross-temporal investigation

Abstract

While online impulse buying has attracted increasing attentions from researchers, there is still limited research that investigates consumers’ impulse buying behavior across different situations. Categorizing external stimuli into three types (website, marketing and situational stimuli), our study examines their joint influences on consumers’ affective and cognitive reactions as well as their online impulse buying behavior. Our empirical findings indicate that the positive effects of website stimuli and marketing stimuli on consumers’ internal reactions exhibit significant variations based on a situational stimulus (i.e., a non-holiday season versus a holiday season). Specifically, consumers react more sensitively to perceived website quality to form both hedonic and utilitarian values during the non-holiday season, while they focus more on prices to judge utilitarian value rather than hedonic value during the holiday season. Furthermore, our results suggest that the cascading mediation effects of consumers’ internal responses vary greatly between the non-holiday season and the holiday season.