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 behavior based on the time spent and train staff to deal with them suitably.

Often in supermarkets, we see some consumers who ignore label details on products that they pick up to buy, just making sure the product meets basic needs. Branding for sure to them is on the back foot. Such consumers are in a hurry and just focus on minimizing checkout hassles. On the other hand, leisure shoppers could be seen scanning each and every nook and corner of the store, spending much time on little interest categories, at times mentoring co-shoppers, especially in India where collectivism is a cultural characteristic. The question here is: Who among the two categories of shoppers would have higher proportion of impulse purchased items in their bill or is it the same for both? Does the ‘time’ factor have differential impact on consumer impulse purchase tendency? This study helps retailers to develop a retail strategy and design stores to maximize impulse purchase tendency-based revenue that already is as high as 60% or more in India. This will help retails to classify shoppers based on ‘time availability’ and train staff to deal with them suitability. This could also serve as additional basis to segment and target shoppers. Retailers usually have express checkout counters but point- of-sale display is mostly same as other counters. The present paper focuses on to supplement information and offer suggestions to tackle the issues raised above. This paper is designed to examine the influence of shopping time availability and shopping duration on impulse purchase tendency.

Consumer Behavior, The Influence of Availability of Shopping, Time on Impulse Purchase Tendency