Exploitation of impulsive buying behaviour of credit card users by e-commerce platforms

Abstract

In the recent times, with emergence of the era of online medium, there have been multiple instances of over-spending and buying items which were not necessary to be bought at that point of time. This compelled and unplanned purchasing behaviour has been termed as Impulsive Buying. (Chan, Cheung, & Lee, 2016) Despite customers being capable of making informed choices given vast information available both online and offline, a considerable number of purchases happen on a whim. Nearly 84% of all the shoppers have made impulsive purchases and 40% of all purchases are impulsive in nature. (Saleh, n.d.). Study of this impulsive behaviour has thus held attention in marketing literature for a long time. With advancement of technology, we can only predict a considerable increase in the impulsive purchases made as it frees customer of the constraints that they otherwise face, for example inconvenient location, shopping hours, transport problem. Another factor that has facilitated the impulsive purchases has been the availability of credit card which help the customer with easy availability of fund, hence encouraging impulsive purchases. Marketeers too are aware of the tendencies of the customers to purchase on a cue and have tried to focus their energies on converting these potential customers. Online marketeers have used a plethora of tools to maximize their sales as they already have an advantage in the form of convenience they provide to the customer. In this paper, we try to understand the online impulsive purchase behaviour of the customers. Our study is focused on college students and young adults and we try to answer the following questions: • What are the factors that are leading to online impulsive purchase? • To what extent does the credit card encourage impulsive purchasing behaviour? • What tools used by the e-commerce website do the customers react most to? • Does the trend differ for men and women?