A Study on the Relationships among Website Quality, Impulsive Buying, and Return Action of Goods in Online Shopping Contexts : Within Stimulus-Organism-Response Framework

In recent years, e-commerce business has grown dramatically along with advancement in information technology (IT), and distribution and delivery services are growing sharply as well. Online shoppers browse through various products at shopping websites, gain information, and make buying decisions. In purchasing goods, website quality is a key factor for shoppers’ buying decision. Factors that decide website quality trigger shoppers’ impulsive buying urge, leading to impulsive buying. However, such unplanned shopping might cause regret. When online shoppers are dissatisfied with what they bought, they might decide to return them. Returning goods entails various costs such as inspection costs, delivery costs, inventory management costs, etc., and the company should bear the loss. In this study, we apply a stimulus-organism-response framework to examine the relationship among online shoppers’ perceived quality of shopping websites, their impulsive buying behavior, and returning of goods. The analysis results are expected to provide useful guidelines to e-commerce companies in establishing strategy for customer relationship management