The Power of Live-Streaming in Consumers’ Purchasing Decision

Abstract

Livestreaming has gained popularity as a new e-commerce platform, communication tool, social network, and source of entertainment for millions of users. It is important to examine the nature and history of this developing area of e-commerce since it has the potential to be exploited to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic’s challenges. Therefore, this study critically explores the consumer livestreaming purchasing behavior and proposes a model, which composed of stimulus, organism, and response as the extension of stimuli-organism-organism model. The structural equation modeling approach applies for analyzing 434 survey responses from a convenience sample. The results suggest that the stimulus variable (source credibility, response capability, platform interactivity) significantly affects the organism variables (customer engagement, swift guanxi), which in turn significantly contribute to creating responses (purchase intentions, actual purchase behavior). Customer engagement and swift guanxi also have potent mediating effects in the model. We offer novel insights into new consumer behaviors in livestream commerce that can underpin future research to promote businesses and services even under challenging conditions.