The data is collected form Scopus, Google scholar, and Microsoft’s database, which are quite comprehensive indexes of scientific literature. The terms like “culture and impulse buying”, “impulse buying in cultural context”, “impact of culture on impulse buying” were used to search the relevant articles in these databases. The articles published between 2000-2020 period were considered. We considered only research article as unit of analysis.

The search is limited to articles written in the English language because of its wide worldwide acceptability as academic language and huge number of publications. There was no restriction on chronology of the articles. A two step search framework was adopted. First, the query on the Scopus database returned 127 articles, which were further analyzed by the authors to check suitability with the field of study and research objectives. Articles which are based on the studies of impulse buying and culture were included, while all other irrelevant studies were excluded in this step. In this step, 89 studies were selected and 38 articles were excluded. Secondly, the specific keywords automatic search on Google scholar and Microsoft academics resulted in 57 articles. Then, all-duplicate studies were excluded by merging the search result and the articles selected in the first step with the help of MS Excel. Further, the authors extensively analyzed these articles from the perspective of the research agenda. The articles written for medical psychology, technological modelling, and other areas which were not having relations with the research questions were excluded. This step excluded 34 articles and included 23. So, finally, 112 articles are considered for further analysis. We classified the studies based on buying behavior, online buying, and impulsive behavior in cultural setting. A tabular representation of the studies describes the author’s name, tittle of the paper, cultural dimensions, and findings.

Figure 1. Source: Prepared by Authors

The phenomenon of impulse purchases can be described as a situation where quick decisions are made which does not allow the consumer to think rationally and perform an evaluation (Maymand & Ahmadinejad, 2012). During an impulse purchase, a consumer does not spend much time and decides quickly to buy a product or service (Jacqueline et al., 2002). So, we can assume that the quick & short process of finding and evaluating product information is largely influenced by cultural factors (Dameyasani & Abraham, 2013). The cultural differences are of enormous importance for in depth understanding of impulse buying behavior because cultural factors influence the consumers’ overall response towards the products or services (Lee & Kacen, 2008). Consequently, researchers found that there exist differences among countries and people based on their culture that make them to behave in a specific manner as a result of the cultural orientation they have grown up in (Cakanlar & Nguyen, 2019b). The cultural dimensions indices such as power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, and collectivism proposed by Hofstede have been studied by researchers to understand impulse buying behavior (Ali & Sudan, 2018; Cakanlar et al., 2019; Dameyasani & Abraham, 2013).

The table details the research tittle, cultural dimensions considered, the methodologies used, the countries considered and their findings. Table 1 exhibits the importance of culture in moderating and shaping consumer impulse buying behavior. Culture plays a very crucial role in the shaping of impulsive buying tendencies both online and offline.

Table 1

S. No.	Theme	Cultural Factor(s)	Methodology	Country	Finding	Source
1	Global consumer culture	Individualism and Collectivism	CFA (Confirmatory Factor Analysis), SEM (Structural Equation Modelling)	UK	The individualistic are more accustomed to global consumer behaviour and demonstrate more impulse shopping.	(Czarnecka et al., 2020)
2	Store atmosphere	Individualism and collectivism	SEM (Structural Equation Modelling)	Brazil and Germany	Emotion significantly & positively affects the impulsiveness of collectivist.	(Barros et al., 2019)
3	Store stimuli	Individualism and collectivism	SEM (Structural Equation Modelling)	Pakistan	The impulse purchase behaviour recorded more in the collectivist consumers.	(Miao et al., 2019)
4	Impulse buying	All cultural dimensions of Hofstede	Linear regression	Sweden, Turkey, and Vietnam	The different cultural background influences the consumer impulse buying behaviour.	(Cakanlar & Nguyen, 2019a)
5	Impulse Buying Tendency	All cultural dimensions of Hofstede	CFA (Confirmatory Factor Analysis), Multiple linear Regression analysis	India	The cultural factors are influencing the impulse buying behaviour of the consumers across cultures.	(Ali & Sudan, 2018)
6	Visual Merchandizing	Collectivism	CFA (Confirmatory Factor Analysis), SEM (Structural Equation Modelling)	Pakistan	Collectivism did not found significant in influencing impulse purchase behaviour.	(Jalees & Mustaghis-ur-Rahman, 2018)
7	Dimensions of compulsive buying	Individualism, Masculinity, Uncertainty Avoidance, Pragmatism, Indulgence Power Distance	CFA (Confirmatory Factor Analysis), ANOVA and SEM (Structural Equation Modelling)	British, Chinese, Czech and Spanish	The compulsive buying behaviour construct is invariant across the different cultural groups	(Eaglen & Schofield, 2017)
8	Transformation Expectations	Heritage	Multi-group structural equation analyses	Thailand and America	The relations between the expectation of transformation and impulsiveness are demonstrated by cultural difference.	(Boonchoo & Thoumrungroje, 2017)
9	Intrinsic factors	collectivism	SEM (Structural Equation Modelling)	India	Collectivism significantly and positively impacts impulse buying	(Badgaiyan & Verma, 2014)
10	Various situations	Individualism and collectivism	Man-Witney test, Binary logistic regression	UK & Taiwan	The UK consumers are buying more on impulse as Taiwanese.	(Ma, 2014)
11	Compulsive buying in developing/developed countries	National similarities and difference	SEM (Structural Equation Modelling), Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)	Russia , Spain ,Netherlands and Turkey	There are more compulsive purchases exhibited by consumers of developing countries than developed economies	(Horváth et al., 2013)
12	Health, affect and self-esteem	Individualist/Collectivist	Two-way ANOVA, Regression analysis	Indonesia and Sweden	The youth exhibited greater impulsivity as of elders in Indonesia, while the convers is true in Sweden.	(Adrianson et al., 2013)
13	Relational collectivism	collectivism	Paired sample t-test and ANOVA	India	Impulsive shopping for relatives such as parents, spouse are more evident in the consumers of collectivist society.	(Khanna & Karandikar, 2013)
14	Symbolic meaning of money	Power distance, collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, Masculinity, symbolic meaning	Multiple linear Regression analysis	Indonesia	Hofstede dimensions and money symbol are influencing impulse buying behaviour significantly.	(Dameyasani & Abraham, 2013)
15	Retail service quality	Individualism and collectivism	Two-way ANOVA	Singapore and USA	Excellent services lead to more impulse purchases and vice-versa.	(Pornpitakpan & Han, 2013)
16	Credit card use	individualism	CFA, MANOVA, MDA and Regression	Korea and USA	The impulse buying behaviour is likely to increase for both national when using credit card.	(Park & Forney, 2004)
17	Shopping Emotion	National similarities and difference	ANOVA, MANOVA and regression analysis	Korea and USA	Two groups differ in their impulse buying nature, Korean students tends to go around, look for options and buy what they need. While American love to buy new fashion apparels.	(Park, 2011)
18	Consumer satisfaction	Individualist/Collectivist	ANOVA	USA, Australia, Singapore, and Malaysia.	Compared to more individualist consumers, more collectivist consumers are likely to be more satisfied with an impulse purchase when another person is present at the time of purchase.	(Lee & Kacen, 2008)
19	Consumer Impulsiveness Trait	Individualist/Collectivist	CFA	Singapore and United States,	Consumers from collectivistic cultures differentiate between the deliberate and involuntary aspects of their impulsive behavior and tendencies, whereas those from individualistic societies are unable or unwilling to make this distinction and for them both these elements merge under a single hedonistic dimension.	(Sharma et al., 2005)
20	Power Distance Belief	Power Distance	Regression analysis	Australia, New Zealand, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippine, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam	There is a link between PDB and impulsive buying as a manifestation of self-control, such that those with high PDB display less impulsive buying	(Zhang et al., 2010)
21	Cultural Orientation on	Individualism and collectivism		USA	Convergent results show that consumers with an independent self-construal tend to have more positive attitudes toward drinking beer and likely to consume more beer. Conversely, consumers with an interdependent self-construal tend to have less positive attitudes toward drinking beer and likely to consume less beer	(Zhang & Shrum, 2007)
22	Cultural Factors	Individualism and collectivism	Z-test and regression analysis	Australia, United States, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia	Compared to Caucasians, Asians engage in less impulse buying behavior due to trait buying impulsiveness.	(Jacqueline et al., 2002)

Source: Prepared by Authors.

A study conducted by (Zhang & Shrum, 2009), found that self-construal positively causes impulsive consumption among customers. If a person is present at the time of shopping, it decreases the impulsive consumption tendencies of interdependence while consumption increased for dependent consumers. The availability of money is having direct and significant relationships with impulsive purchasing of consumer across cultures (Dinesha, 2017). In the literature, there is evidence that cultural aspects affect the consumer impulsive purchase behaviour. The factors like normative and social influence (Cakanlar & Nguyen, 2019b), self-indulgence (Sharma et al., 2005), cultural values & lifestyle (Bashir et al., 2013), neuroticism (Miao et al., 2019), extraversion (Badgaiyan & Verma, 2014) and religious values (Danish Habib et al., 2020) are significantly influencing impulsive purchase behaviour.

The following Table 2 represents the models of impulse buying behaviour in a cross-cultural context. The focus of the research, theoretical foundation, research methods etc. of impulse buying behaviour is depicted in Table 2.

Table 2

Source: Prepared by Authors.

From the above table it is evident that most of the researchers have adopted the S-O-R framework as a theoretical foundation and survey methods for getting the responses of the respondents. Web sites related factor is the most researched factors and considered in almost every studies. The visual appeal via web atmospherics and visual merchandising have been found to be another important factor in stimulating the impulse buying online. The payment methods, ease of navigation, and security, also positively influences online impulse buying. Online recommendations and reviews of the fellow purchasers are of enormous importance and help web retailers to establish credibility among their potential buyers.

Cross-cultural research has attracted scholars across disciplines from last two decades. The proliferation of internet, super growth of e-commerce business, and consumer orientation of many societies offers tremendous opportunities for impulse purchase revenue for international marketers. However, very little has been done to summarize the studies and present their findings in a conducive way. The current review is an attempt to analyse and list out the importance of culture in understanding global impulse buying behaviour.

These studies show that culture is instrumental for an understanding of consumer behaviour, and it prominently influences the consumer impulse purchase behaviour. (shown in Table 2). Hence, marketing strategies should be developed considering the cultural impact on consumer reactions. The impulsiveness of the consumer depends on many factors, such as emotional state, impulsiveness traits, mood, normative evaluation, self-identity, demographic factors, etc. All these factors are being influenced by culture and cultural theories are offering interesting and important insight about these factors, which are directly or indirectly linked to consumer impulse buying behaviour.

Most of the studies applied cultural dimensions proposed by Hofstede as shown in Table 1 and 2. Very few studies have used all the dimensions of national culture as proposed in Hofstede cultural framework. The majority of the analysis have been done considering either one or two factors i.e. collectivism/individualism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance etc.

Majority of research studies carried out on the consumers of United States, Great Britain, and few on South African & Chinese consumers. Almost all the studies considered primarily individualism/collectivism to understand the consumer impulsiveness trait, as these economies are individualistic at large.

There is very little research available on the online impulse behaviour in a cross-cultural setting. Online impulse buying is revenue puller for the firms operating across cultures. Therefore, the marketers need to have deep insight about the interplay between culture and online behaviour in term of impulsiveness. In addition, the marketers need to understand the role of website quality and its personalisation in creating urges to purchase impulsively.