How Perceived Crowding Shapes Tourists’ Impulsive Buying in Internet-Famous Supermarkets: The Roles of Bipolar Emotions and Brand Trust

This study investigates the impact mechanism of perceived crowding on consumer impulsive buying in the context of internet-famous supermarkets. Based on environmental psychology, this study proposes a moderated mediation model. Survey data from 565 tourists, collected between December 2024 and January 2026, were analyzed using structural equation modeling with SPSS 27.0, AMOS 28.0, and PROCESS macro 4.1. The results reveal that perceived social and spatial crowding exert divergent effects on impulsive buying and positive and negative emotions. Positive emotions act as a significant mediator between spatial crowding and impulsive buying, whereas social crowding drives impulsive buying primarily through direct social contagion rather than emotional pathways. Furthermore, while brand trust was hypothesized to broadly moderate this process, results reveal a limited and counterintuitive moderating role. It significantly interacts only with perceived social crowding, unexpectedly dampening its positive effects on both impulsive buying and positive emotions, whereas all other moderation and moderated mediation hypotheses remain unsupported. This research clarifies the distinct emotional mechanisms of perceived crowding and the specific suppressing role of brand trust, enriching environmental psychology and cognitive appraisal theory while providing practical guidance for the sustainable development of internet-famous retail.