Investigating the Moderating Effects of Consumers’ Product Involvement and Knowledge in the Relationship between Product Scarcity Content and Online Impulse Buying Intention

Impulse buying is one of the significant behaviors of consumers that can occur under the influence of motivating factors and stimuli, and identifying the areas and occurrence of this behavior play an important role in defining and implementing marketing programs. The messages based on market scarcity seem to be one of these factors. The purpose of this study is to investigate and analyze the effect of commodity scarcity messages on consumers' online impulse buying intention instantly with respect to the moderating effect of product involvement and consumer product knowledge. So, this applied research has been done experimentally and scenario design. For this purpose, based on the description of the messages in three levels and for two selected products with different levels of involvement and consumer knowledge, six scenarios were designed, and research variables were measured in the form of presenting a scenario to the participants. The research data were collected in a statistical sample of 194 people who were selected from the statistical population of students of Shahid Beheshti University by the non-randomized method. Finally, the research hypotheses were analyzed by analysis of variance (ANOVA). The findings indicate the significant effect of scarcity messages content on consumers' online impulse buying intentions. However, scarcity messages based on a limited supply of goods are more effective than supply time constraints. Also, product involvement and consumer knowledge have moderated these relationships, so that this effect is more in consumers with low product involvement and low knowledge about the product than others.