A Customer Choice Model of Impulse Buying in Social Commerce

ABSTRACT Social commerce integrates user interactions and user‐generated content with commercial activities in the context of social media platforms. Examples include Instagram Shopping and TikTok Shopping, where brands attach product tags directly to their posts, enabling users to complete purchases within the social media platform. A user's on‐site purchase decision can be driven by the impulse to buy upon seeing a product, but is constrained by their limited attention. In this paper, we propose a choice model that captures users' impulsive behavior and limited attention span during purchase decisions on social media platforms. We explore a retailer's product display problem on a social media product page. We show that the size of the optimal display set can be monotone decreasing or increasing on the level of impulsiveness of the customer population, depending on the interplay between the population's inclination for impulse buying and their attention span. When the influence of impulse buying outweighs the effect of attention span, it can be optimal for the retailer to display a larger set of products. Additionally, we examine two strategies for retailers to stimulate purchases on social media platforms. One is to invest in environmental cues to enhance user impulse buying behavior, and the other considers leveraging influencer promotion of a specific product.