Empirical Study On Consumer Online Impulse Buying Behavior In C2C E-Commerce

According to CNNIC's report, till Jun 2008, the number of Internet user in china has reached 253 million, which has ranked first in the world, and more than one quarter of them prefer shopping online. Studies show that online impulse buying behavior is very common. It's necessary to research more about this particular behavior.Based on offline shopping environment, impulse buying has received considerable attention from psychologists,marketing researchers and economists, and we have received extensive research findings. But few researchers focused on online impulse buying and references are insufficient. In particular, no studies show if we can get similar conclusions when we apply traditional research framework in online shopping environment.Based on summary of previous studies, combined traditional research framework with characteristics of online setting, this paper proposes a theoretical model. Four external stimuli are summed up and they are price& promotion,image-text display,evaluation by others and transaction record. Impact of the external stimuli on impulse buying intention and impulse buying behavior is analyzed.After questionnaire investigation and statistics analysis by SPSS 13.0, seven main conclusions were made. Firstly, four external stimuli influence positively the emotion response. Especially, the greatest one is image-text display and the next is evaluation by others. Secondly, consumer emotion response influences directly the impulse buying intention. Thirdly, consumer impulse buying intention influences directly the impulse buying behavior. Fourthly, consumers who have higher impulse traits are easily emotional react. Fifthly, compared with male consumers, more impulse buying behavior occurs from female consumers. Sixthly, consumers who are in different ages have similar impulse buying behavior. Seventhly, consumers of different sex buy different goods when impulse buying behavior occurs. Male consumers prefer digital products and culture& sports products. But female consumers'first three favorite categories are clothing& footwear,cosmetics and personal& home decorations.At last, according conclusions of this study, we propose several marketing suggestions in order to guide online retailers in their operations. Limitation of this study and future research directions are also discussed.