Most of us have done it at some point during the second cup of coffee. A little thrill in the chest, a banner that reads “only two left,” a scroll through an app, and then the soft thud of a confirmation email. It wasn’t a planned purchase. An hour ago, it wasn’t even particularly desired. And yet there it is, traveling, followed by a number we will most likely forget by tomorrow.
Scholars have been quietly attempting to map this moment for years. Not the actual purchase, but the moments leading up to it. Approximately 40% of online spending occurs in this manner, with little to no planning, according to a 2021 meta-analysis that combined 54 different studies on online impulsive buying. According to Nielsen, impulsive purchases are roughly 5% more common online than in physical stores. Five percent doesn’t seem like much until you consider how big the pie is. A significant portion of the six trillion dollars in global e-commerce revenue in 2024 came from choices that people hardly recall making.
It’s intriguing how scholars have begun to categorize consumers in a manner akin to a taxonomy. Convenience shoppers, store-oriented shoppers, balanced buyers, and variety seekers are the four categories of online shoppers according to a popular typology created by Rohm and Swaminathan in 2004 and revived in more recent work. Ifeoma Adaji of the University of Saskatchewan conducted a study of 226 online shoppers to see how each group reacted to six traditional persuasion strategies taken from Robert Cialdini’s old playbook: scarcity, authority, consensus, liking, reciprocity, and commitment.
The outcomes were strangely specific. Convenience shoppers were the most susceptible to scarcity. Consensus and the comfort of crowds were preferred by store-oriented consumers. People who were looking for variety reacted to authority. Commitment cues, or the little psychological agreements a website presses you into before you’ve even reached checkout, were the main factor influencing balanced buyers, the planners.
Reading this as a manual is tempting. Marketers do, for sure. However, reading the literature gives the impression that the researchers themselves are becoming more and more uncomfortable. A team under the direction of Dr. Rashmi Chaudhary published a behavioral review in August that details a digital world where influencer endorsements, flash sales, and personalized recommendation engines virtually eliminate the decision-making window. The phrase that keeps coming up is “bypassing rational evaluation.” It’s a polite way of saying that the system is meant to prevent you from thinking.
All of this has been accelerated by mobile. According to the studies, consumers who shop on phones tend to be more impulsive than those who shop on desktop computers. The smaller screen might be the cause. Perhaps it’s the setting—bed, bus, pharmacy line. Particularly among younger millennials and Gen Z, social commerce—the kind that occurs within Instagram or TikTok without ever feeling like a store visit—has become its own engine. According to a Statista survey referenced in the review, over 80% of millennials admitted to making impulsive online purchases, which are typically prompted by flash sales or someone they sort of trust online.
The meta-analysis contains a more subdued discovery that is worth considering. Strangely, impulsive purchases were not significantly influenced by website security. In certain economic situations, neither did price. Visual appeal, usability, and the small theater of urgency—countdown timers, low-stock badges, and real-time inventory notes—were far more important. Several of these effects were moderated by a nation’s level of economic development, so the same strategy doesn’t work as well in São Paulo as it does in Stockholm.
It’s difficult to ignore a change in tone as this corpus of research expands. It reads like marketing optimization in the early papers. The more recent ones read like cautions. It’s another matter entirely whether the people creating these platforms are paying attention.
