A Study on Digital Payment Apps and Impulse Buying: Analysing Spending Behaviours among University Students

Author

B. Vinisha, Dr. Aysha Fathima


Abstract

 Digital payment apps like Google Pay and PhonePe have made paying for things very easy, and students are among the people using them most. This study tries to find out whether this ease has anything to do with impulse buying. Data were collected from 90 respondents using a structured questionnaire and analysed with percentage analysis, chi-square test, independent-samples t-test and one-way ANOVA. Most respondents (91.1%) use a payment app daily or several times a week. A good number said they spend more when no physical cash is involved (81.1%) and that they hardly notice how much they have spent (80.0%). Around half (51.1%) said offers and cashback make them spend more than they planned. Gender and age did not make a significant difference. The study suggests that students need more awareness about their spending, and that payment apps could help by giving simple budgeting features.



Keywords

Digital payment apps, UPI, impulse buying, spending behaviour, university students



Full Text:

Download Paper PDF


References


  1. Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50(2), 179–211.
  2. Beatty, S. E., & Ferrell, M. E. (1998). Impulse buying: Modeling its precursors. Journal of Retailing, 74(2), 169–191.
  3. Prelec, D., & Loewenstein, G. (1998). The red and the black: Mental accounting of savings and debt. Marketing Science, 17(1), 4–28.
  4. Prelec, D., & Simester, D. (2001). Always leave home without it: A further investigation of the credit-card effect on willingness to pay. Marketing Letters, 12(1), 5–12.
  5. Raghubir, P., & Srivastava, J. (2008). Monopoly money: The effect of payment coupling and form on spending behavior. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 14(3), 213–225.
  6. Reserve Bank of India. (2024). Annual report 2023–24. Reserve Bank of India.
  7. Rook, D. W. (1987). The buying impulse. Journal of Consumer Research, 14(2), 189–199.
  8. Soman, D. (2001). Effects of payment mechanism on spending behavior: The role of rehearsal and immediacy of payments. Journal of Consumer Research, 27(4), 460–474.
  9. Verplanken, B., & Herabadi, A. (2001). Individual differences in impulse buying tendency: Feeling and no thinking. European Journal of Personality, 15(S1), S71–S83.
  10. Vohs, K. D., & Faber, R. J. (2007). Spent resources: Self-regulatory resource availability affects impulse buying. Journal of Consumer Research, 33(4), 537–547.

Share your valuable work from Social Media Buttons