Philanthropic sales in live-streaming shopping: The impact of online interaction on consumer impulse buying

Abstract

As philanthropic sales via live-streaming shopping have played an important role in alleviating the huge backlog of agricultural products during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper aims to study how online interaction in philanthropic marketing exerts influence on consumer impulse buying behaviors. We empirically explore four major dimensions of online interactions in philanthropic live-streaming sales, i.e., the live streamers’ image, the herd effect of consumers, the responsiveness of sellers, and the mutual trust between consumers. The results reveal that the herd effect of consumers and the responsiveness of sellers could promote consumers’ empathy ability toward the growers of the products sold lively, whereas the live streamers’ image and the mutual trust between consumers have little effect on empathy promotions. Meanwhile, both the consumers’ empathy ability and the live streamers’ image positively affect consumers’ impulse buying behavior, which suggests a partial moderating role of consumers’ empathy ability. Lastly, by taking both social and business perspectives, we provide managerial implications for improving the effectiveness and efficiency of philanthropic live-streaming sales to alleviate social and economic pressure in emergencies.

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

“…These social factors are represented by Wanghong attractiveness or Wanghong trustworthiness ( Park and Lin, 2020 ), positive evaluations towards the vendor based on their reputation, hedonic effort, price advantage, etc., as well as a crowd perception of other buyers ( Leeraphong and Sukrat, 2018 ). It may also derive from a relationship state with the streamer, such as para-social interactions ( Ko and Chen, 2020 ), affective intensives ( Zhang et al, 2022a ), swift guanxi ( Men and Zheng, 2019 ), etc. The second stream focuses on the technical features of live streaming, including technology enablers such as visibility affordance, meta-voicing affordance, and guidance shopping affordance ( Sun et al, 2019 ); Learning-related affordances like coactive vicarious learning and independent vicarious learning ( Li et al, 2020 ); And IT-mediated mechanisms such as value transmission, vicarious experience learning, and product presentation ( Chen et al, 2019 ).…”

The Influence of Anchor Characteristics on Consumers' Impulse Apparel Purchase Intention — Evidence from FsQCA

“…and Deng [39,40]. After the formation of the initial questionnaire, the items were first reviewed by experts, teachers, and students in the field of apparel marketing, deleting or modifying unclear and ambiguous expressions, adjusting and enriching the content of the questionnaire according to the modifications, and then conducting a small pre-survey, and then modifying the questionnaire according to the results of the research.…”

Increasing the organizational performance of online sellers: the powerful back-end management systems

“…Indeed, the link between online sellers' knowledge management and e-commerce activities can support online sellers in collecting information on customers' transaction preferences while improving the flexibility of the back-end management system (Zikopoulos, 2019;Ku, 2022). In the context of e-commerce flexibility, online sellers should respond to buyers' demands quickly by directly collecting their requirements (Ye et al, 2022). Consequently, the flexibility of the back-end management system enables online sellers to be agile.…”