Online shopping is considered a modern, vigorous, 24/7 available, and routine activity. Consequently, consumers conveniently engage in online shopping activities for immediate pleasure or instant sensual inspiration. These shopping motivations could be indispensable tendencies of compulsive online buyers, who are characterized by unabated and repetitive buying needs. To satisfy these irrepressible urges, compulsive buyers can easily turn to online shopping to derive positive emotions and pleasurable experiences. Further, compulsive buyers seek sensual arousal and inspiration, implying that their shopping urge is mainly related to hedonic motivations which are likely to be more stimulated on the Internet, a fast-growing substitute to conventional shopping.
Male and female shoppers have different concerns regarding online shopping and thus show different shopping behavior on the Internet. Therefore, examining the gender differences of shoppers in various hedonic shopping motivations in relation to compulsive online buying would be insightful.
Based on 904 shoppers, this study aims to investigate various hedonic shopping motivations (i.e., adventure seeking, gratification seeking, idea shopping, role-play shopping, social shopping, and value shopping) that can lead consumers to develop compulsive buying behavior on the Internet. It further investigates how gender differences among shoppers would influence the impact of these motivations on compulsive buying behavior.
This study finds that adventure seeking, gratification seeking, and idea shopping positively while role-play shopping, social shopping, and value shopping contribute to compulsive online buying. Moreover, it was found that females are mostly gratification seekers, while males are mostly information seekers. Conversely, value and role-play shopping reduce compulsive online buying, with a stronger effect on females; however, role-play shopping was unrelated to compulsive online buying for males.
