Although many interventions have been introduced for self-monitored consumer shopping, there have been few studies evaluating the effectiveness of the techniques in real-world settings. In this paper, we first conduct an online survey of 118 consumers in their 20s to investigate their impulsive buying behaviors and self-control strategies. Based on survey results and literature surveys, we develop interventions that can assist consumers' self-controlled online shopping, including Reflection, Distraction, Desire Reduction, and Salient Costs.
The results show that all interventions are effective in reducing impulse buying while increasing variation in customer experience. 1 Online survey results on online shopping and impulse buying tendencies (note that we only present the top 5 answers for each question here). In this thesis, we want to investigate how interventions affect consumers' self-controlled versus impulsive buying during online shopping.
To answer the research questions, we first conduct an online survey with 118 consumers in their 20s to investigate their online shopping tendency and impulse buying pattern (eg, contexts and self-control strategies). We find that impulse buying occurs by being attracted to the product itself (motivational), striving for savings (savings), and seeking positive emotions from shopping (shopping enthusiasm). Consumers usually try to curb their impulse buying behavior by reframing the cost to be more salient, delaying and encouraging their deliberation and reflection.
Results show that all four interventions effectively reduce impulse buying after each intervention task, while increasing variation in customer experience.
Impulse buying
Behavior Change Research
Furthermore, previous studies suggest that an imagined-scenario approach can reduce the likelihood of the social desirability biases [15,22]. reasons for using the e-commerce sites, money spent as a result of impulse purchases, and impulse purchase product categories), the context of impulse purchases and self-control strategies to limit their spending.
Method
Results
We summarize the result of online shopping trend and impulse buying of the participants in Figure 1. Naver is the most famous portal site in Korea, which shows the query results from many e-commerce sites. We exclude Naver because we focus on online shopping on e-commerce sites in this work.
We uncover ten thematic codes for the context of impulse buying: remembered, suggested, motivating, saving, complementary, fear of loss, shopping enthusiasm, decision fatigue, financial affordability, and social responsibility. To analyze context-related responses to impulse buying, we first review previous studies that classified types of impulse buying [43, 44]. However, these categorizations do not fully cover our answers as the question in our survey is about the impulse buying situation including when and how.
We code responses about self-control strategies according to the categorization of Moser et al. They offer seven categories of desired self-control tools: making costs more salient, encouraging reflection, enforcing spending limits, increasing checkout effort, procrastinating, avoiding, and reducing product desire. Our survey responses indicate that making costs more salient, forcing postponement, encouraging discussion or reflection, enforcing spending limits, and avoidance are the most common strategies participants used (N=34, N=32, and N=30 , respectively).
Make costs more salient (N=34): Participants reframe costs to be more salient, such as checking their account balance or card payment and converting to alternative uses of money (“I decide not to buy if I can't afford the credit card amount for next month, after looking back at the account balance and calculating living expenses.", P4), ("Imagine how many portions of pork belly that is.", S6). Some participants build financial plans or goals to prevent impulse buying ("Low a financial plan for this year. Set goals such as buying my own house, investing a lump sum and marriage funds.", S97). Forced postponement (N=32): Participants postpone a decision to buy a product, expect to forget the product, waiting in anticipation of a lower desire for the product or taking extra time to consider (“I can prevent my impulse buying by keeping products in my shopping cart and correcting them continuously.”, S11).
Encourage reflection (N=30): Participants try to curb impulse purchases while considering whether the purchase is really necessary (“Consider and judge whether this product is necessary for me or an extravagant product.”, P29), (“Consider and judge whether this product is necessary for me or an extravagant product.”, P29), (“Consider whether the product is a must for me, or a good product to have.”, P97). Some participants avoid impulse purchases by setting limits for themselves by setting rules or opening an installment savings account (enforcing spending limits, N=15) and avoiding a shopping environment such as uninstalling a shopping application (avoidance, N=13). Other participants report that they curb their impulsive purchases by using social responsibility (N=3) (“Ask others' opinions,” P26), which reduces product desire (N=2) (“Watching review videos that shortcomings are mentioned). reduces the desire to purchase.”, P96), pure reliance on willpower (N=2) (“Pass myself.”, P17), and increasing effort at checkout (N=1) (“I don't use the automatic payment system .”, p110).
Intervention Design
Distinct costs (Figure 2 D) show the opportunity costs of the selected product from different perspectives. To the selected products, we offer a drop-down list with proportional and popular products, which is created based on the survey of consumer buying trends in the 20s and price indices [45,46]. If the user selects an interesting item from the list, a message like "If you save this money N more times, you can go on a trip" will appear.
Postpone gives a 2-minute delay before customers check out without any restrictions or instructions. We have set 2 minutes as the wait which is the average time for performing other intervention tasks. We implement interventions as a Chrome extension to conduct an experiment on the real e-commerce site.
The extension hides the 'My Cart' buttons (a button to view the products in the cart) and the 'Check out' buttons of the e-commerce site to prevent users from purchasing products without experiencing the intrusions. When the user clicks the "Add to Cart" button, the extension opens a new pop-up window showing the intervention tasks. When the user completely completes the intervention task, the pop-up window closes automatically and the extension scripts make the hidden buttons visible again.
Study Design
To measure the effectiveness of the interventions, we ask the participants several questions about impulse buying urge, intervention task workloads, user experience, impulse buying tendency. As the participants became ready, the experimenter explained the purpose and procedure of the experiment. In the main study, the participants were faced with an imaginary shopping scenario to explain the impulse buying context based on the online survey (Table 1 Financial Affordability).
If the participants had changed their mind not to purchase the product while performing the intervention task, they could have left the intervention task and purchased other products. As participants completed the intervention task, questions regarding felt urge to buy impulsively and purchase intention were presented again to capture any changes following the interventions. After answering all questions, participants returned to the experiment page for the post-survey session.
Then we asked the participants whether they had planned to buy the selected product (YES/NO), the reasons for the choice (free text answer) and whether they had already planned to buy the product (YES/NO). Participants rated their user experience with Reasons for Interventions (UXQ1–UXQ4) and answered questions about impulse buying tendencies. Participants scored an average of 4.14 (SD=1.38) on the question assessing their need to control impulsive online shopping.
We ask participants to write down replacements of selected products and assess their necessity, which have not been considered in previous work. Reflection: Participants of the Reflection group felt that the intervention was helpful in reducing the urge to impulse buy and making a debatable and reasonable consumption choice. Finally, we find that if participants meditate longer while experiencing the intervention, the effect of the intervention becomes greater (r=0.52, p<.05).
In particular, the participants would not want to buy the product even though they would perform such a cumbersome task, especially if it was an impulsive purchase or if the product is not really needed. Participants were able to have an objective decision-making process after comparing the pros and cons of the products. Participants report that the impulse buying process occurs very quickly with an immediate impulse from product selection to purchase.
To be bought?” was the criterion for the participants to define their behavior as impulse buying. In the case of the Reflection Group, the participants made purchase decisions based on the boundary between reasons to buy and reasons not to buy. Participants in the Desire Reduction group listed and compared the pros and cons of the products.
Participants in the salient cost group compared the value of the selected product to other opportunity costs.
