An Empirical Study of Impulse Buying Behavior in Online Bookstores

Online shopping is gradually becoming popular in the developing countries like India. The online bookstores have emerged as a new destination which attracts millions of shoppers every day. The impulse buying in the offline stores has been a major area of interest for the researchers. But with the boom in online shopping, there is a scope to study the different aspects of impulse buying in online stores. This paper presents the study of various aspects of online impulse buying viz. hedonic shopping, website quality, trust, situational factors and variety seeking in Indian context. With the data collected from the online survey method the different antecedents of impulse buying have been analysed and reported on the basis of their significance. The hedonic shopping was found to be the major factor influencing impulse buying in online bookstores. This study also discusses about the managerial issues, suggestions and implications for the future researchers. The understanding of the behavior of the online shoppers in terms of their impulsive behavior would be helpful for the marketers and academicians.