Impacts of situational factors on buying decisions in shopping malls : An empirical study with multinational data

Purpose – To investigate the impact of situational factors on mall shoppers' buying decisions. Design/methodology/approach – Based on Belk's framework on situational factors in a sales situation, the study employed a dataset of mall shoppers in the USA, China and Hong Kong and logistic regression for analysis. Findings – It is found that, whether in the combined sample or in the individual samples, nine of the 13 situational factors considered significantly affected shoppers' purchases of food or non‐food products. However, situational influences on purchases varied according to the types of products bought. More importantly, the findings on the impact of some factors were consistent across three or two samples, suggesting that their external validity may be extended to certain conditions. Research limitations/implications – The study had a limitation in the selection of the malls where the interviews were conducted, so some of the findings may be mall‐specific rather than representative of the general population of shoppers in the nations or regions. Practical implications – The information disclosed here may help the practitioners to better understand shoppers' (especially Chinese shoppers') behaviour in malls and, as a consequence, to undertake more efficient marketing strategies in malls (especially in the malls in China). Originality/value – The distinguished feature of this paper is that it simultaneously examined the impacts of 13 situational factors on mall shoppers' purchase decisions with multinational data. This allowed researchers to check both the internal validity and the external validity of the observed impacts of the situational factors.