The influences of virtual reality shopping characteristics on consumers' impulse buying behavior

Abstract

With the rapid development of virtual reality (VR) hardware devices and virtual technologies, VR applications in retailing are increasingly becoming an inevitable trend of future shopping, particularly essential to the “metaverses” in the digitalization 4.0 era. Thanks to its superiority over traditional e-commerce, virtual stores can provide highly interactive and immersive sensory shopping experiences to system users or end customers. Todays, both retailers and scholars, pay much attention to impulse buying behavior. Nevertheless, this domain remains unaddressed in the context of virtual commerce. Drawing upon the Stimulus-Organism-Response paradigm, this article investigates the effectiveness of VR shopping platform factors, namely interactivity and vividness, that impacts consumers’ internal stages (telepresence, perceived diagnosticity, and playfulness) and lead to the urge to buy impulsively in virtual shopping stores. A full 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design experiment was conducted with 227 participants. The empirical results show that interactivity and vividness positively impact telepresence, perceived diagnosticity, and playfulness, which trigger consumers' urge to buy impulsively. Furthermore, the role of the impulsiveness trait in driving the urge to buy impulsively was further explicitly investigated in the VR environment. Detailed discussions and future research directions were also provided.