Driving the urge to buy fashion products impulsively in social commerce: the interplay of platform attributes, customer experience and self-construal

Abstract

Focusing on customer experience quality as the central mechanism, this study aims to explain how stimuli on social commerce platforms trigger the urge to buy fashion products impulsively. This study used a theory-driven survey design supported by an exploratory qualitative pre-study. The pre-study helped identify context-specific experiential dimensions and their underlying drivers using Belk’s (1975) situational framework. The main study tested the conceptual model using survey data from 420 fashion social commerce consumers and partial least squares structural equation modeling. Results show that social support and perceived discounts are the strongest experiential drivers, while affective-sensory, social and flow experiences significantly enhance the urge to buy impulsively. Interestingly, interdependent self-construal is found to strengthen the affective-sensory pathway and weaken the cognitive pathway to the urge to buy impulsively. By linking platform-level situational cues with multidimensional customer experience and individual self-construal as a personal boundary condition, this study provides a focused explanation of how fashion social commerce stimulates impulsive buying urges, while offering practical guidance for designing emotionally engaging and socially interactive shopping environments.