“I Can’t Even Recall What I Bought”: How Design Influences Impulsive Buying in Douyin Live Sales

Abstract

Impulsive buying tendencies exist on Douyin, the most popular Chinese social media platform, primarily due to the users’ exposure to live sales events. This study delved into examining impulsive buying behaviour, specifically triggered by external stimuli, through the lens of the Stimulus-Organism-Response framework model. Thus, our study implemented a tailored Douyin client, namely Douyin X, that contains four interventions: Visualizing the wallet’s balances, enhancing payment friction, Prolonging the duration of purchase decision-making, and imposing browsing time limits and usage statistics. Our user study with 20 participants implies individuals’ impulsive buying due to external stimuli, combined with the proliferation of impulsive buying-promoting designs, which has led to the excessive prevalence of impulsive buying in live e-commerce. Our research offers a comprehensive framework that can effectively mitigate the likelihood of impulsive buying behaviours, specifically from a design-oriented standpoint.

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