Understanding Consumers' Post-purchase Behavior by Cognitive Dissonance and Emotions in the Online Impulse Buying Context

With the rapid development of technology, consumers nowadays can experience the entire consumers journey via the Internet and mobile devices. Thereby, it not only changes the shopping channel but also changes the shopping patterns of consumers. However, due to the convenience of e-commerce, it seems that consumers are more likely to have impulse buying behaviors. Subsequently, it would induce negative cognition and emotion states accordingly. Thereby, in order to figure out how consumers response to the impulse buying behavior via cognitive dissonance and emotion state, we mainly adopt the concept of cognitive dissonance from Powers and Jacks [1] and the relationship between regret and the follow up response, rumination [2]. Consequently, this study conducts a questionnaire to receive responses of those who have online impulse buying experience before. In the end, we receive 248 valid responses in total. After data analysis, the results show that consumers would conceive product dissonance more after impulse buying, and then bring out regret which leads to rumination. Eventually, our findings may be helpful for retailers or online platform operators to manage with their customers or conduct relative strategies in e-commerce.