See me, feel me, impulse buy me. An analysis of physiological and behavioural responses to unplanned and impulsive online purchases

The phenomenon of Impulse Buying, conceptualised as a sudden act of purchase with no pre-shopping intentions driven by short-terministic decision-making and a compelling urge to purchase, has gained upswing due to the spreading of e-commerce activities. Traditional literature pertaining to economics and psychology has tended to investigate the subject relying on self-reported measures, often discounting the underlying automatic and implicit mechanisms driving the impulsive online purchase. The present work was intended to characterise the online impulsive purchasing behaviour by complementing self-reports with physiological and behavioural responses. The study encompassed an experimental investigation involving 76 healthy right-handed subjects who faced the possibility to perform an actual purchase on a renown online marketplace either spending a limited provided monetary endowment or employing a larger amount of money received in a previous unrelated experimental phase. During each session three different signals were acquired, namely electroencephalogram, electrodermal activity and ocular responses. Muscular and ocular artefacts were identified and removed from the electroencephalogram signal through independent component analysis using detection through predefined topographies and the resultant was processed to compute attention, memorisation, approach-withdrawal, and engagement indexes. Electrodermal activity was processed to extract arousal metrics through continuous decomposition analysis. Whereas eye-tracking signal was employed to detect the instants of the first fixation on the bought product and to assess the different purchasing phases. Results highlighted that the process of online impulse buying stems from a combination of impulse spending traits and unplanned purchasing actions, which results in post-purchase guilt. Specifically, impulse spending traits appear to be mainly driven by personality traits and physiological arousal, whereas unplanned purchasing actions result to be triggered by product characteristics and younger consumer’s age. Our results corroborated previous findings concerning personality traits, product involvement, physiological arousal, and subsequent post-purchase guilt. We further underscored that impulse buying may not be characterised by heightened physiological attraction along the purchasing process nor that is triggered by peculiar information search patterns. Lastly, our findings highlighted the existence of a contradiction between self-perception of individual impulsivity and actual impulse buying behaviour.