Digital Stimuli and Online Impulsive Buying Behaviour: An Extended Stimulus-Organism-Response Framework

Abstract

The quick development of digital commerce has changed the online buying landscape and gives consumers more opportunities to make impulsive, unexpected purchases. Even though online impulsive buying behaviour has been thoroughly studied in the past, the current study emphasises specific digital cues, actual impulsive purchases, and their repercussions. To close this gap, this study propositions an expanded conceptual framework based on the Stimulus–Organism–Response (S–O–R) model to explain impulsive online purchasing behaviour in contemporary digital retail settings. According to the model, digital cues that influence customers' impulse purchasing include interface design, social commerce signals, temporal scarcity, and payment facilitation methods. The impulse-buying urge is located as the central organismic mechanism underlying post-purchase dissonance. The framework also incorporates trait impulsivity, self-control, financial literacy, and cultural orientation as moderating variables of urge and online impulsive buying behaviour. By integrating various digital stimuli, an underlying psychological mechanism, a post-purchase consequence, and individual-level boundary conditions, the projected framework extends existing research on online impulsive buying and broadens the application of the S–O–R perspective to contemporary digital retailing. The study contributes to the consumer behaviour literature by providing an all-encompassing framework for understanding the antecedents and psychological aspects of online impulse buying. The suggested model also has implications for developing more ethical and successful digital retail strategies and provides a basis for further empirical study.