INVESTIGATING THE EFFECT OF HEDONIC FACTORS ON ONLINE IMPULSE BUYING IN THE FASHION RETAIL SECTOR

Abstract

An exploratory study was conducted to understand the influences of different marketing stimuli in fashion retail websites on impulse buying, reflecting customer eye movements. Both previous research and existing theoretical applications, such as TAM (Technology Acceptance Model), have no significant reflections on the respective study. This led to identifying empirical and theoretical gaps in understanding the research problem as “there is no a scientific study conducted to analyse web-based customer eye movement on impulse decisions in the Sri Lankan fashion retail sector”. The research methodology was guided by the interpretivist paradigm. Twenty (20) structured interviews were conducted to collect data displaying three (03) sample websites under the application of an eye-tracking tool. The duration of an eye-tracking session was 30 seconds per website, which is more than 3 times of modern customer attention span. The respective websites are categorised as high, medium & low graded based on features, appearance, and navigational quality. The thematic analysis revealed that eye movement indicated hedonic features, such as colours used in websites, quality of pictures and graphics, simplicity of websites and promoting influence to emerge impulse customer decision making in fashion retail sector. The study is significant as the scientific understanding of the eye movements of web surfers is required to realise how hedonic influences of web stimuli emerge in impulse buying. The study proposed to develop a conceptual model leading to project impulse buying in a web-based shopping environment referring to eye-tracking observations.