The Influence of Availability of Shopping Time on Impulse Purchase Tendency

It is believed that availability of time has differential effect on the purchase decision of shoppers. Leisure shoppers extensively visit the store aisles, whereas time-starved shoppers may overlook product details and even brands, and just focus on minimizing checkout hassles. This paper analyzes the availability of shopping time and its influence on impulse purchasing. The paper also analyzes who among the two categories of shoppers, the time starved or leisure shopper, would have higher proportion of impulse purchased items in their bill, i.e., whether ‘time' factor has a differential impact on consumer impulse purchase behavior. Intercept retail survey is conducted on a carefully selected sample of shoppers and the collected data is analyzed with suitable statistical tools to reach certain interesting conclusions like time-starved shoppers are more impulsive buyers in comparison to non-time-starved shoppers. The findings of the study will help retailers to develop retail strategy and design stores to maximize impulse purchase-based revenue by providing them insights into time spent by the shoppers in store and their purchase behavior, which in turn will help them to discriminate shoppers' purchasing behaviour based on the time spent and train staff to deal with them suitably