Determinants of Online Impulse Buying in Fashion Industry: A study Focused on Western Province, Sri Lanka

Abstract

Online impulse buying behavior is one of the major phenomena in the fast-emerging e-commerce industry in Sri Lanka and especially in the fashion industry. The factors that lead to online impulse buying in the Western Province, Sri Lanka were explored in this research, pertaining to internal, external, situational an sociocultural factors. The study fills this research gap of local empirical research on this issue and comes up with findings applicable to the Sri Lankan context. It took a quantitative, cross sectional approach, survey design with a conveniently selected sample of 384 online fashion consumers, aged 18 to 60 years in the urban area within the Western Province. The structured questionnaire with 5-point Likert scale was employed to collect the data, and the analysis of such data in terms of descriptive and inferential statistics, correlation, and regression analysis was performed with the help of IBM SPSS 24.0. Pilot survey was conducted to test the questionnaire and the Cronbach’s alpha values of all variable were greater than 0.7, ensured the internal consistency of variables. The result proves that the four variables; external (e.g., sales promotions, quality of the websites), internal (e.g., emotional states, hedonic motivation), situational (e.g., availability of time and money), as well as sociocultural (e.g., peer influence, social acceptance) are significantly and positively associated with online impulse buying behavior. It is peculiar to note that external influences including lower cost and promotion by celebrities as well as internal factors including dispositions in the mood and the need to relax have been very high predictors. These findings provide a good implication to retailers and marketers in the fashion industry in Sri Lank.