While emerging markets like India present a highly conducive environment for impulse buying behaviour, they also represent a conundrum due to their cultural and contextual distinctiveness from Western/developed markets. Most existing research in the domain in these markets aims to either (dis)affirm the causal relationships identified in the Western markets or validate the frameworks developed there. This article is an exploratory study that aims to identify the latent factors that restrain, influence or comprise impulse buying process in the Indian context and describes an impulse buying episode in its entirety. This would help to not only highlight similarities or differences from the developed world but, more importantly, also broaden the impulse buying perspective in the emerging markets and allow future research to build upon it empirically.