An empirical study on impulse consumption intention of livestreaming e-commerce: The mediating effect of flow experience and the moderating effect of time pressure

Abstract

Based on the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) model, this paper studies the impulsive consumption mechanism of consumers participating in livestreaming e-commerce from the perspectives of information source characteristics and social presence and examines the mediating effect of flow experience and the moderating effect of time pressure. Based on the consumption data of 268 live shoppers, multiple regression analysis and Bootstrap method were used to test the research hypothesis. The empirical results show that the credibility, professionalism, attractiveness, and interactivity of live information sources have significant positive impacts on consumers’ flow experience and impulsive consumption intention. Furthermore, coexistence, communication and emotional presence of social presence have a significant positive impact on consumers’ flow experience and impulsive consumption intention. Flow experience plays part of the mediating role in the process of the characteristics of livestreaming information sources and social presence affecting consumers’ impulsive consumption intention, while time pressure has a positive moderating effect in the relationship between livestreaming information source characteristics and coexistence presence and flow experience. The higher the time pressure, the stronger the promotion of live information source characteristics and coexistence presence on flow experience. This study enriches the research literature on the consumption driving mechanism of livestreaming e-commerce and offers practical enlightenment and reference to improve the effectiveness of livestreaming e-commerce anchors. It is also one of the first studies to apply the theory of flow and social presence to the impulsive consumption intention of livestreaming e-commerce.

Formation mechanism of user stickiness in live e-commerce: the hybrid PLS-SEM and ANN approach

“…Some researchers have studied the mechanism underlying the purchase intention of consumers from many perspectives including information technology (IT) affordance (Sun et al, 2019), online celebrity-product, product-livestreaming content matching (Park and Lin, 2020), swift guanxi (Zhang et al, 2020), reducing uncertainty (Lu and Chen, 2021), eye-tracking experiments (Fei et al, 2021), emotional contagion (Meng et al, 2021), emotional intermediary (Zhou and Tong, 2022) and mental imagery quality and customer trust (Wang et al, 2022). Other researchers have studied impulse buying in live e-commerce from perspectives including popularity cues (Lou et al, 2022), human-computer interaction (Yang et al, 2022), flow experience and time pressure (Dong et al, 2023), information transparency (Xu et al, 2022), livestreaming interactions (Liu et al, 2022) and extending the elaboration likelihood model with herd behavior (Yang and Lee, 2023).…”

“…, 2022), human-computer interaction (Yang et al. , 2022), flow experience and time pressure (Dong et al. , 2023), information transparency (Xu et al.…”

“…The rapid development of live e-commerce has led to a change in the business model, which researchers have evaluated. The early studies, including purchase intention (Zhu et al ., 2022; Zhou and Tong, 2022; Fei et al ., 2021), impulse shopping (Dong et al ., 2023; Fu and Hsu, 2023), product sales (Wang et al ., 2023; Luo et al ., 2021), sales performance (Liu et al ., 2023a), customer engagement (Dang-Van et al ., 2023; Qin et al ., 2023; Kang et al ., 2021; Wongkitrungrueng and Assarut, 2020) and satisfaction (Ma, 2021; Chen, 2019) elucidated some aspects of consumer behavior.…”

Empowering pro-environmental behavior in tourists through digital media: the influence of eco-guilt and empathy with nature

“…For instance, Xu et al (2021) found that the sense of presence induced by individuals watching online live-streamed shopping positively influences their purchase intention. Additionally, Dong et al (2023) highlighted the significance of presence in live e-commerce, where it serves as a crucial incentive for consumers to experience flow and develop impulse consumption intentions. Building on this literature, our study posits that a higher sense of presence experienced by individuals when browsing destination environmental threat information through digital media facilitates a deeper understanding of the destination’s ecological environment, thereby stimulating TPEBI.…”

How social and media cues induce live streaming impulse buying? SOR model perspective

“…However, social influence is often interpreted as the presence and the number of other viewers ( Leeraphong and Sukrat, 2018 ; Ko and Chen, 2020 ; Zhang et al, 2022b ), the features of streamers ( Wang et al, 2018 ; Hou et al, 2019 ; Ko and Chen, 2020 ; Park and Lin, 2020 ; Xu et al, 2020a ; Zheng et al, 2023 ), and the action and enthusiasm of sellers ( Leeraphong and Sukrat, 2018 ). Besides, as for the internal mechanism of environmental cues inducing behavior, previous research has emphasized the mediating role of relationship status, flow experience ( Dong et al, 2023 ), personal characteristics ( Gao et al, 2022 ), and community-triggered emotions ( Lim et al, 2020 ; Li et al, 2021 ), few studies have focused on personal emotional changes ( Xu et al, 2023 ) and emotional subdivided dimensions. Moreover, while the uncertainty concern surrounding experience products is a critical barrier to online consumption, few studies have offered concrete suggestions on how to eliminate it.…”