Investigating Determinants of Impulse Buying in Social Networks : The Perspective of Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) Paradigm

Impulse buying is popular in online shopping environment. Users usually spend lots of time on online surfing and purposeless browsing web sites. Consumers are easily aroused their desire to buy or actually buy some products what they do not really need and have no plan by limited volume, low price, the approaching time, or several types of online advertisement. Even in the social network, impulse buying is unavoidable. When users are surfing in the social network and browsing posts, they may be attracted by someone’s shared experience or interesting links of shopping web site and then have an urge or actual behavior to buy the same product. Social commerce will be an emerging trend. Consumers could gather other users’ contributions for acquiring more valuable products and services. Only limited work has been done on online. Even though literatures explore the influence of users’ emotion reactions, they only focus on planned purchase decision-making. Little research focuses on impulse buying in a social network. We think consumers could fulfill their experiential, emotional and social needs and then they impulsively buy a specific product more easily in a social network. We think the influence of social network on online shopping should be paid more attention. Impulse buying is a sudden, emotional, and spontaneous purchase decision. Literatures in impulse buying focus on direct influences of personal traits and situational factors. However, we think these antecedents will exert their effects on impulse purchase desires and impulse buying only when consumers aware, perceive or have actions them. Accordingly, we apply Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) paradigm to explore affective, cognitive and reactive factors of impulse buying. We propose several mediators between the association of these antecedents and online impulse buying in social networks based on the social capital theory and the flow theory. Accordingly, we propose a two-year project for addressing these two important issues. In the first year, we primarily investigate influence of affective (social bridging and social bonding) and cognitive (impulsiveness) factors on impulse buying desires and behavior mediated by peer communication and intimacy from the social capital theory. In the second year, we mainly explore influence of reactive factors (content richness and attractiveness) on impulse buying desires and behavior mediated by browsing activities and customer experience from the flow theory. Moreover, we consider moderating effects of fitness of personal interests and herd behavior on the relationship of “urge to buy” and “impulse buying.” This study will conduct online surveys and a field experiment for data collection. Then we will analyze the collected data in every year. We will propose theoretical and managerial implications based on results of data analysis.

Project ID:PB10207-0367
External Project ID:NSC102-2410-H182-012