Influencer Marketing and Impulse Purchase Intention in E-Commerce: A Systematic Review and Future Research Agenda

Abstract

Social media influencers have become prominent agents in e-commerce and social commerce, yet evidence on how they trigger impulse buying is dispersed across platforms, constructs, and theories. A recent review addressed impulse buying in live streaming e-commerce, leaving influencer-driven impulse buying beyond live streaming, and studies published after mid-2024, largely unsynthesised. This systematic literature review therefore maps research on social media influencers and impulse buying behaviour and intention in e-commerce and social commerce, and proposes a future research agenda. Following PRISMA 2020, ScienceDirect, Scopus, ProQuest, and EBSCOhost were searched for peer-reviewed, English-language journal articles first published online between 2020 and 2025, and quality was appraised with the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool. A working corpus of 28 studies was coded descriptively. Output peaked in 2025. Live streaming was the most frequent context (11 studies), whereas 15 studies examined other settings; Instagram, YouTube, TikTok Shop, and Facebook commerce were each represented by a single study. The stimulus–organism–response framework was the most common theoretical lens (at least seven studies). A preliminary thematic reading suggests that research centres on influencer or streamer attributes and credibility, relational and emotional mechanisms such as trust, parasocial interaction, and emotional contagion, and content or context features. The field is concentrated on live streaming and one dominant theory. Future research should address non-live platforms, outcome definitions, theoretical integration, and the downstream consequences of impulse buying. Findings remain provisional pending full-text coding.