psychology · 3 min read
ADHD, impulse and the eleven item cart
A good share of the people who use this site arrived from ADHD communities. So we looked up what peer reviewed research measures about impulse buying, and what our own 33,374 orders show about its shape.
by Arthur
published September 24, 2026
A good share of the people who use this site came from ADHD communities, and the reason they give is always similar: buying here gives you the feeling without the bill. That raises a question too serious to answer by guessing, so we went after two things: what peer reviewed research has actually measured about impulse buying, and what our own 33,374 orders show about the shape an impulse takes.
What the literature says, with names attached
The largest review on the subject is by Maraz, Griffiths and Demetrovics, published in the journal Addiction in 2016. They pooled 40 studies, with 49 estimates from 16 countries and roughly 32,000 people, and landed on a compulsive buying prevalence of 4.9% in representative adult samples, rising to 8.3% among university students. Common, in other words, but nowhere near the norm.
On the link with ADHD, the most convincing study is by Brook, Zhang, Brook and Leukefeld, published in Psychiatry Research in 2015, because it followed the same people for 29 years, from an average age of 14 to an average age of 43. Adult ADHD symptoms showed up associated with compulsive buying, alongside earlier impulse buying, depressive mood and prior illicit drug use. Read that sentence carefully: association is not causation, and none of it diagnoses anyone.
The shape of an impulse, in our own numbers
| items in the order | orders | % of total |
|---|---|---|
| 1 item | 11,894 | 35.6% |
| 2 to 3 | 6,146 | 18.4% |
| 4 to 5 | 3,953 | 11.8% |
| 6 to 10 | 5,083 | 15.2% |
| 11 or more | 6,298 | 18.9% |
All 33,374 orders recorded in our database through September 21st, 2026. It counts distinct items, not units: asking for seven of the same graphics card counts as one item.
Look at the shape of that table. The most common order holds a single item, 35.6% of the total, and right behind it comes the pile of eleven or more at 18.9%. The middle band, four to five items, is the smallest of them all. Once price leaves the room, the cart stops having an average size: either somebody comes in for one specific thing and leaves, or they go down the entire list.
Repetition tells the same story. Of the 261,180 order lines in our history, 10.6% carry a quantity above one, averaging 2.1 units. And the record for a single line is 8,644 units of the same product inside one order, which is not a purchase: that is somebody holding down the plus button to see how far it goes.
What you can actually take from this
We have already published here that a person's second order tends to arrive about ten minutes after the first, and that people who come back the next day build a cart the same size, with no escalation. Put together, those two facts say what the literature keeps repeating about impulse: it is a short state, not a permanent feature of your day.
- •Closing the tab is not willpower, it is changing state. In our data the impulse that grows inside a session simply does not survive the night.
- •A wishlist exists to postpone, and postponing is exactly what our curve shows working.
- •If the urge to buy shows up alongside boredom, small hours or frustration, that is information about the moment, not about the product.
An impulse here has no average size: it is either one item or eleven. Knowing that cures nothing, but it helps you notice which of the two modes you are in.
A warning it would be dishonest to skip: this store lives off delivering exactly that feeling, so we have a stake in the subject. Nothing here is a diagnosis, a clinical assessment or a treatment. If you recognized the pattern and it is costing you real money, late bills or arguments at home, the person who helps with that is a mental health professional, not a website selling an empty total.