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Cross-border e-commerce live streaming morphs into an epidemic shopping scenario, yet there is a paucity of research on impulse purchasing in this context. The purpose of this study is to empirically investigate the adoption motivation of cross-border e-commerce live streaming and its influence mechanism on intrinsic response and purchase impulse and to highlight the mediating role of browsing behavior.

Based on the use and gratification lens, a new conceptualization model is established to captivate the theoretical relationships between perceived stimuli, individual attitudes, browsing behavior and impulsive purchases. A questionnaire survey was used to collect cross-sectional data from 427 Malaysian consumers and the estimated framework was validated through AMOS-structural equation modeling technique.

The findings confirm that perceived interactivity, perceived information usefulness and perceived enjoyment significantly influenced positive attitudes toward live-streaming, which in turn induced impulsive purchases; however, perceived affective gratification did not stimulate positive attitudes. Consumers’ utilitarian browsing had a stronger effect on impulse purchases than hedonic browsing and utilitarian browsing behavior mediated the relationship between positive attitudes and impulse buying; however, hedonic browsing had neither a direct nor a mediating effect on impulsive purchases.

This research enhances the literature on the impact of cross-border e-commerce live streaming, an emerging technology, on consumer behavior and offers managerial implications for e-commerce practitioners to gain insights into consumer impulse purchasing behavior.

The findings revamp conventional knowledge and provide new angles for understanding the formation mechanisms of impulse purchases, motivations for virtual media use and browsing behavior mediating effects in the context of live streaming.

This study aimed to understand better what makes esports fans engage with streamers' live-streaming of esports gameplay. This study used the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) and additionally adopted streamer identification and esports game identification as moderating variables.

Data were collected from streamers' esports content streaming viewers over 18 years of age using an online survey in Amazon M-Turk (N = 307). Based on past esports live-streaming weekly watching hours, which range from 1 to 45 h, the participants were divided into lower (n = 152) and higher (n = 155) frequency groups. PLS-SEM and bootstrapping techniques were used to test the moderated mediation relationships among the constructs.

This study found a negative moderating effect of past watching experience on the relationship between attitudes and behavioral intention, and it positively moderated the path between perceived behavioral control and behavioral intention. Also, it was found statistically significant direct impacts of streamer identification (STI) and esports game identification (EGI) on attitude and subjective norms. While the indirect impact of STI on behavioral intention through attitude was statistically significant, there were no significant indirect impacts of EGI on attitude and behavioral intention through subjective norms.

Theoretically, this study extends the TPB model by exploring the two identifications (i.e. streamers and esports games) as antecedents of the focal TPB factors (i.e. attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control) and the moderating effect of prior experience based on high/low weekly watching frequencies. Practically, content creators of esports live-streaming and live-streaming platform managers can use the study’s findings to develop strategies to nurture their current and future viewership.

E-commerce live streaming (ELS) has become a new and important shopping channel. Although previous studies have provided insightful findings on how to engage consumers in ELS, limited effort has been made to explore the role of factors of live streaming rooms. Based on the literature on space perception and the retail environment, this study aims to develop a theoretical model to examine how perceived distance and perceived depth affect consumers' affective and cognitive perceptions and then further impact product attitude in ELS.

This study collected 414 valid survey responses to test the proposed research model. Survey data were analyzed using partial least squares (PLS)-structural equation modeling. The PLS Multi-Group analysis (PLS-MGA) was used to test the consistency of the research model across different product types and watching durations.

The results suggest that environmental factors of a live streaming room (i.e. perceived distance and perceived depth) can impact consumers' attitudes toward the product in the live streaming via both cognitive and affective routes. These effects keep consistent across different product types and watching durations.

The paper focuses on the environmental perspective, which is unexplored in previous literature on ELS. It highlights the importance of the space design of live streaming rooms.

This study aims to explore the determinants of viewers’ gifting and social sharing behaviours in online streaming from a dual-attachment perspective and to explain how live streaming fosters attachment through a social interaction aspect.

This study conducted an online survey with 316 valid responses to test the research model. The structural equation modelling approach was applied to assess both the measurement and structural models.

The results show that both bond-based and identity-based attachments promote gifting and social sharing behaviours. Participation and cognitive communion motivate viewers to establish bond-based attachment, while group interaction among viewer crowds encourages viewers to create identity-based attachment. In addition, group interaction can moderate the relationship between participation and bond-based attachment.

This study is one of the earliest attempts to highlight the significance of viewer crowd and viewer-viewer interaction in promoting viewers’ behaviours in live streaming context. This study also indicates that viewer-viewer interaction can moderate the impact of viewer–streamer interaction, which is among the first to investigate the interaction effects of viewer-viewer interaction and viewer–streamer interaction.

This study aims to understand how different levels of streamer channels influence luxury brand sales in live streaming commerce. This study also seeks to understand the conditions under which luxury brands may benefit more from different level streamer channels.

Panel data were collected from 17 international luxury brands on the Douyin live streaming platform in an 18 week period from August to December 2020 and analyzed by using a two-way fixed effects model.

The authors compared different mega-, macro- and micro-streamer channels within live streaming commerce and found that the densities of mega- and macro-streamer channels had significant positive impacts on luxury brand sales in live streaming commerce. Moreover, the effects of the density of streamer channel on luxury brand sales were moderated by such variables as product line breadth, product line depth, product type (star/non-star) and product price (high/low). The authors found that product line breadth and depth could reduce the positive impact of the densities of mega- and macro-streamer channels on luxury brand sales. For star products and high-priced products, the relationship between the density of mega-streamer channel and luxury brand sales was more likely to be observed than for non-star products and low-priced products. The relationship between the density of macro-streamer channel and luxury brand sales was more likely to be observed in low-priced products than in high-priced products.

The findings make important contributions to the literature in that the authors expand the influencer-brand fit theory by proposing a new model of effects of the densities of mega-, macro- and micro-streamer channels on sales performance across different luxury products to improve our understanding of the fit among influencers, brands and products. This helps luxury brands make basic decisions of “who sells” and “sells what” when engaging in live streaming commerce.

Drawing on the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) model, this study examines how live-streaming shopping influences purchase intentions in young consumers. The multigroup analysis is applied to understand the similarities and differences of factors that trigger purchase intentions among buyers and non-buyers in live-streaming shopping.

A snowball sampling was used to collect data from 507 Chinese consumers between June and September 2022 using Wenjuanxing, i.e., an online survey platform in China. The data was analyzed using the partial least squares method of structural equation modeling.

The findings revealed that amongst the three relational bonds, social and structural bonds were positively associated with trust, whereas financial bonds had no significant relationship with trust. This implies that while price discount might not have any significant relationship with trust, the social interactions that college students have with the live-streamers and their products build trust, which in turn translates to purchasing decisions. Comparing buyers and non-buyers, the results support that buyers have a higher level of trust in live-streaming shopping than non-buyers. This is indicative of the authentic and immersive experiences enjoyed by consumers in live streaming that generate structural bonds and foster stronger connections (relational bonds), thereby establishing trust.

This study is one of the first empirical studies targeting college students as participants in live streaming. These findings are expected to provide actionable insights to streamers especially in converting non-buyers to buyers in live-streaming broadcast.

This study aims to explore how specific cues with new manifestations (i.e. herding message and price discount information) and customer cognitive style influence attention allocation and purchase intention.

To empirically validate the research hypotheses, an eye-tracking experiment with a 2 × 2 × 2 mixed design was conducted on a sample of 44 participants recruited from a university in China. Repeated measures analysis of variance was employed for data analysis.

The results show that herding message and price discount information play different roles in viewers' attention and have an interactive effect on attention. Moreover, individual cognitive styles moderate the impact of herding message on attention allocation. Still, two cues positively affect customer purchase intention.

This study guides future research by applying cue utilization theory to investigate the effects of two cues in live streaming. Findings offer practical implications for how live streaming cues affect viewers' attention allocation and purchase intention.

Live streaming commerce becomes increasingly popular, and some special shopping behaviors existing in traditional e-commerce also emerge in this new context. The current research mainly focuses on determinants of compulsive buying in live streaming commerce by taking fear of missing out (FOMO) and social influence into account.

Using the data collected from 242 experienced consumers in live streaming commerce, the proposed model was empirically assessed by partial least squares based structural equation model.

The results show that both informational and normative social influences have positive effects on FOMO, which in turn exert an influence on compulsive buying. In addition, informational social influence also directly and positively affects compulsive buying.

This study provides a deeper understanding of FOMO and social influence in the process of compulsive buying. It offers a new avenue to analyze the mechanism regarding why compulsive buying occurs in live streaming commerce.

On December 20, 2021, Viya, a social media influencer (SMI) with the largest number of followers in China, was exposed for having evaded RMB 643 million in taxes during 2019 and 2020. Consequently, she was fined a total of RMB 1.341 billion by the tax authorities. While the strict government regulations demonstrated in the Viya event may build confidence in the consumers for future purchases, the exposure of issues and problems through implementation of the stronger government regulations may warn consumers off. Thus, the main objective of this paper is to examine the effect of government regulations on consumers' usage intentions of live streaming e-commerce by taking the Viya event as an example.

The authors consider both the positive effect of consumers' perceived benefits of the government regulations and the negative effect of their perceived risks of the Viya event on the usage intentions of live streaming e-commerce. After collecting 314 subjects with diverse gender, ages, education levels and income profiles, the data are processed by partial least squares-based structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and SmartPLS software.

The results demonstrate that strict government regulations can build trust in consumers of live streaming e-commerce by increasing the perceived benefits of restricting the behavior of SMIs. Among the potential perceived risks (social risk, safety risk and psychological risk), the safety risk is supported to have a negative effect on consumers' trust in live streaming e-commerce platforms. Besides, the authors have also identified different types of usage intentions in live streaming e-commerce, i.e. watching intention and purchase intention, and have empirical support for the positive relationships between the consumers' trust in live streaming e-commerce platforms and different usage intentions.

The authors' findings contribute to the application of commitment-trust theory, institutional theory and organizational control theory in the context of the live streaming e-commerce industry. Particularly, the authors use the Viya event as an example to quantitatively examine the effects of strict government regulations, which enriches the existing literature on this topic.

This study applies parasocial relationship theory to identify the role of broadcaster characteristics in the highly interactive business setting of live streaming commerce.

A total of 401 online questionnaires were distributed to individuals with live streaming showroom shopping experience, and SmartPLS software was used to analyse the data and test the hypotheses.

Broadcasters' characteristics are positively associated with viewers' parasocial relationships, thus further enhancing viewers' attitudinal and behavioural loyalty towards that broadcaster's streams. Parasocial relationships mediate the effects of most broadcaster characteristics (except for expertise) on attitudinal and behavioural loyalty. In addition, parasocial relationships have a stronger positive effect on viewer behaviours for hedonic products and under high match-up.

The broadcaster is a key indicator of the success of live streaming commerce. This study establishes a well-organized framework to understand how broadcaster characteristics influence viewer loyalty towards that broadcasters' streams based on parasocial relationship theory.