Impulse buying in online food delivery: A bibliometric and thematic analysis across three research domains

Abstract

Online food delivery platforms have reshaped how consumers order food, and their design features may encourage unplanned, emotion driven purchases. Research on impulse buying and on online food delivery has each expanded considerably, yet the two streams have developed largely in isolation. This study maps their intersection using a bibliometric and thematic approach. Three Scopus corpora were built on impulse buying (n = 292), online food delivery (n = 1,251) and impulse buying in online food delivery (n = 77), giving 1,620 articles published between 2020 and 2025, with the intersection corpus extended to 2019. The screening followed a PRISMA protocol adapted for bibliometric work. Annual production, country output, source concentration (Bradford’s Law), keyword co-occurrence, thematic maps and country-level bibliographic coupling were analysed in R and Biblioshiny, while co-authorship networks were visualised in VOSviewer. Output grew in all three corpora until 2024, led by China, India and the United States, and the intersection corpus remained the smallest. British Food Journal and Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services appeared as leading outlets in more than one corpus. Key themes included customer satisfaction, trust, technology acceptance, the pandemic and live streaming, with only weak links between the two fields and little research from Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. The study identifies theoretical, contextual and cross-cultural gaps and proposes research questions on platform affordances, social presence and cultural moderators.