Virtual reality (VR) has been set with an expectation of becoming the technology to enable new electronic businesses on metaverse platforms. VR is an application of three-dimensional computer graphics to create a convincing virtual environment where users can interact (Cowan & Ketron, 2019). The most used immersive VR devices are head-mounted displays. Importantly, in addition to visual sense, auditory, haptic, and olfactory senses stimulating devices are used in conjunction with head-mounted displays to reach a multi-sensory VR experience (Xi & Hamari, 2021). VR has been part of the brand strategy for various marketing endeavours (Cowan & Ketron, 2019) such as viewing furniture or kitchen setups by IKEA or creating virtual customer experiences in the real estate sector. However, VR’s impact on the consumer thought model has not been thoroughly examined. This extended abstract contributes to this shortcoming.

Every year consumers spend billions of dollars on impulse purchases across the globe. Noticeably, occasions for impulse buying have been expanding due to new technologies and the growth of e-commerce that enhanced both the consumer’s accessibility to products and the ease of purchase transactions (e.g., one-click purchase) (Strack and Deutsch 2006). For instance, the retail store have become ubiquitous—being present on our desktop, in our mailbox, on our phone, in subway platform, in gas station kiosks—and reaching every street corner in our neighborhood. Such ubiquitous nature of mobile commerce combined with the introduction of IT devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets) makes consumers even more vulnerable to the sudden, powerful, and persistent urge to buy something instantly (i.e. impulse buying) (Rook 1987; Watson et al. 2002; Danaher et al. 2015). From the perspective of firms, this indicates that marketing opportunities to influence shopper attitudes and behavior can emerge at any point in the shopping cycle from the couch in a person’s living room to the shopping cart in mobile devices and media (Shankar et al. 2010; 2011). While impulse buying has been a well-known approach to explaining empirical deviations from the rational choice model in the literature (Strack et al. 2006), previous researchers have mainly focused on antecedents of impulsive behaviors, such as mood (Rook and Gardner 1993), self-construal (Zhang and Shrum 2009), chronic goals (Ramanathan and Menon 2006) and consumers’ self-loneliness (Sinha and Wang 2013). However, relatively little has been studied on what factors drive consumers to purchase products impulsively and how firms can utilize marketing activities (e.g., 4Ps) to engage consumers in such behavior. There exist a few studies paying attention to the interaction of individual characteristics and marketing variables for impulse buying (e.g., Bell et al. 2010; Inman et al. 2009; Narasimhan et al. 1996) but several issues still can arise from measurement problems, self-selection, lack of marketing variables, and limited breadth of product categories. In particular, researchers have used the term ―unplanned‖ purchases exchangeably with impulse purchases despite a conceptual distinction between the two terms: impulse buying is defined with three key components; unplanned, difficult to control, and resulting in emotional response (Rook 1987). In other words, mostly all impulse purchases are unplanned, but not all unplanned purchases are impulse buys and we cannot rule out other alternative explanations (e.g., it is a ―reminder‖ purchase based on true needs). In this study, therefore, we aim to differentiate two terms and investigate the consumers’ impulsive purchase behaviors using the actual behavioral data with respect to product characteristics, customer demographics, timing and controllable marketing activities such as advertising. We obtained the data from one of the leading TV shopping channels in Korea on 2,657 products and 17,848 air time slots covering a broader range of both hedonic and utilitarian products including electronics, food, fashion, home appliances, and so on (7.8 million orders and 2 million order cancels). Unlike typical supermarket shopping where consumers can actively search products, programming on TV shopping channels are shown randomly to viewers which helps us rule out self-selection problems. Most importantly, distinct from previous studies, we use an objective measure for impulse buying by exploiting the actual order placement and subsequent order cancellation (i.e., regret with retrospective judgment about purchase decisions). We find that product characteristics are the primary factors explaining the half (60.5%) of impulse purchase ratio variations followed by marketing variables (20.4%), and timing fixed effects (10.9%). Interestingly, we find little evidence of consumer demographics (1%) as a driver for impulsive buying behavior. Consequently, we focus on the interplay between product categories and marketing activities. Specifically, we classified the product categories into utilitarian and hedonic on the basis of the gross product categories and investigated the roles of two main marketing activities: advertising and price promotion. We find that the informative and persuasive roles of advertising (Akerberg 2003; Mehta et al. 2004) lead to a U-shaped effect on impulse purchases over time as the informative role attenuates over time but the persuasive role increases over time. While utilitarian products are more likely to be influenced by informative role of advertising and hedonic goods are more likely to be influenced by persuasive role of advertising, we detect that the U shape would be moved to the left (right) with a price discount (increase). In other words, price information does not change over time but the persuasive role increases over time with a price discount. Hence, our results can provide managerial insights for retailers and manufacturers to utilize point-of-sale marketing tactics and to improve their shopper engagement strategies to trigger impulse purchases.