Paper Details

Name: Amandeep Kaur
Country: India

Year: 2026
Volume: Volume No: 13, Issue: 1, Year: 2026
Page Number: 321-330
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20959179

ABSTRACT
The rapid growth of e-commerce in India, accelerated by widespread smartphone adoption, affordable mobile data, and the expansion of digital payment infrastructure, has transformed how people shop. More significantly, it has changed when and why people buy things they did not plan to buy. Impulsive buying — a purchase made in response to a sudden, unplanned urge — is not a new consumer behaviour, but the digital environment has made it considerably easier to act on. E-commerce platforms are designed to compress the gap between impulse and purchase through personalised recommendations, urgency notifications, one-click checkout, and visually stimulating interfaces.

This study investigates the psychological triggers driving impulsive buying behaviour on e-commerce platforms among young adults aged 18-35 in Punjab, and examines whether gender, emotional state, peer influence, and platform design characteristics significantly predict impulsive buying tendency. Primary data were collected from 160 respondents across Ludhiana, Chandigarh, and Mohali using a structured questionnaire with validated scales. The study employs Cronbach's Alpha for scale reliability, descriptive statistics to profile triggers, a one-sample z-test, an independent samples t-test for gender comparison, a one-way ANOVA across platform usage frequency groups, Pearson correlation matrix, and multiple linear regression to identify the strongest predictors of impulsive buying tendency.

Results confirm that impulsive buying tendency in this sample is significantly above neutral (z = 11.47, p < 0.001). Female respondents display significantly higher impulsive buying tendency than male respondents (t = 3.24, p = 0.001). Platform usage frequency significantly differentiates impulsive buying tendency across groups (F = 18.63, p < 0.001). In the regression model, emotional arousal (Beta = 0.341), platform visual appeal (Beta = 0.289), and urgency cues (Beta = 0.214) emerge as the three strongest independent predictors, together explaining 54.2% of variance in impulsive buying tendency (R2 = 0.542, p < 0.001).

Keywords: impulsive buying, e-commerce, psychological triggers, emotional arousal, online consumer behaviour, gender differences, multiple regression, Punjab