Understanding the influence of impulse buying toward consumers’ post-purchase dissonance and return intention: an empirical investigation of apparel websites

Abstract

In this information-based era, online shopping has become prevalent. A well-designed webpage interface (visual appeal) could promote consumers’ emotions (pleasure and arousal), thus stimulating their impulse buying. However, existing researches regarding online impulse buying are mainly focused on the influence of website attribute stimulation on impulse buying, without probing into consumers’ post-purchase cognitive dissonance (product dissonance and emotional dissonance), and their return intention. Therefore, this study aims to integrate external websites stimuli (visual appeal), emotional responses (pleasure and arousal), and consumers’ impulse buying tendencies, in order to explore the effect on impulse buying and the subsequent effect of post-purchase behavior (post-purchase dissonance and return intention). An online survey was conducted on 428 participants who had purchased apparel products online, in order to empirically examine the proposed research model. Partial Least Squares (PLS) was employed to analyze the research model. The results show that (1) pleasure directly and positively influences consumers’ impulse buying, whereas arousal indirectly influences consumers’ impulse buying through pleasure, (2) impulse buying directly and positively influences consumers’ product dissonance, whereas impulse buying indirectly influences consumers’ emotional dissonance through product dissonance, (3) consumers’ emotional dissonance directly and positively influences consumers’ return intention, whereas product dissonance indirectly influences consumers’ return intention through emotional dissonance.