How Amazon Prime membership reinforces impulsive buying behavior

What is it about?

Amazon, the leader in the e-retailing sector, has revolutionized online shopping through its vast areas of customer solutions, particularly with its Amazon Prime membership. Nonetheless, shoppers’ behavior and attitudes in similar programs are yet to be researched. Accordingly, this study aims to examine the effect of self-control on trust, affective attachment and impulse buying in online membership programs. Herein, researchers integrate retailers-consumers’ relational variables alongside shoppers’ behavioral dimensions, to understand the long-term relationship members have with Amazon Prime. A quantitative approach was adopted for this purpose, based on data collected over a period of two months from 630 respondents surveyed across the United States of America. Findings show that while self-control first delimits impulsive shopping, it also reinforces shoppers’ cognitive and affective ties with Amazon Prime, counter-intuitively increasing their impulsive buys. This study is thus the first to demonstrate that retailers’ membership programs such as Amazon Prime may come at the expense of consumers. This is due to the fact that such programs appear to reinforce impulsive behavior, while giving a false-sense of self-control to the shopper.

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Why is it important?

within the context of retailers’ membership driven programs, in particular Amazon Prime, this study advances the understanding of the underlying online shopper behavior. Several previous studies have tackled consumers’ perception, trust and online customer behavior. However, despite the well-established notion that self-control limits impulsive shopping, this paper is the first to demonstrate that such control also reinforces buyers’ cognitive trust and affective attachment to the retailer, probably due to its empowering sense of confidence and safety – hence increasing their online impulsive buying.