Digital Twin Experience and Impulse Buying: The Mediating Role of Spendception and the Moderating Role of Control

Rapid advancements in digital payment technologies have completely changed how customers perceive spending, frequently making money less psychologically visible and promoting impulsive buying. This study creates a dual-mechanism framework to explain how digital spending environments both facilitate and regulate consumer purchasing decisions, building on the idea of Spendception. Spendception has been break into two dimensions: Perceived Spendception Control (PSC), which measures consumers' perceived capacity to keep an eye on and control their financial behavior in extremely stimulating online environments, and Perceived Spendception Ease (PSE), which describes the seamless and cognitively effortless character of digital spending. The study investigates how Digital Twin Environment (DTE) affects impulsive purchasing behavior through these two mechanisms, using survey data from Generation Z consumers involved in social commerce. PSE mediates the relationship between DTE and impulse buying by lowering psychological spending barriers, while PSC moderates this relationship by enhancing consumers' financial self-regulation and decreasing impulsive purchasing tendencies, according to the results of a study that used structural equation modeling in conjunction with machine learning techniques. These results show that the degree to which emotional stimuli result in impulsive consumption is determined by two opposing psychological forces produced by digital payment systems: spending facilitation and spending control. By viewing Spendception as a multifaceted concept, the study advances Spendception theory and offers crucial insights into how digital financial technologies affect consumer behavior in social commerce settings. The results emphasize the significance of creating digital payment systems that strike a balance between transactional ease and features that promote responsible consumption and financial awareness from a sustainability standpoint.