The impact of social presence and facilitation factors on online consumers' impulse buying in live shopping – celebrity endorsement as a moderating factor

Abstract

PurposeAlthough prior studies have studied the relationship between online consumers' attitudes and buying behaviour, the research focussing on online consumers' impulse buying behaviours and exploring the role of celebrity endorsement is limited. Drawing on the social presence and the social facilitation theory, this paper establishes a research model based on the stimuli–organism–response (S–O–R) model and the motivation theory. It explores how live streamers impact online consumers' impulse buying behaviours under specific social and cultural backgrounds, with celebrity endorsement as a moderating variable.Design/methodology/approachTo test the research model, the online questionnaire method has been conducted in this study. This paper utilises Chinese online consumers as samples and promotes an online survey. Using the variance-based structural equation modelling and partial least squares path modelling (SEM-PLS), 433 valid questionnaires have been analysed on SmartPLS.FindingsFirst, live streamers' attractive appearance positively correlates with online consumers' hedonic attitude and positively impacts their utilitarian attitude to live shopping. Second, live streamers' real-time interaction positively affects consumers' utilitarian attitudes because of their professional marketing and communication skills. Third, their hedonic and utilitarian attitudes positively influence online consumers' impulse buying behaviours. Finally, this paper presents that celebrity endorsement negatively moderates the relationship between online consumers' hedonic attitudes and impulse buying during live shopping.Originality/valueThis research combines the S–O–R model and the motivation theory and analyses related social influencing factors to study online consumers' impulse buying behaviours. Meanwhile, it explores the celebrity endorsement factor as a moderate role and identifies the different effects between live streamers and celebrities in live shopping, which is of great significance to the strategy of live shopping marketing and the literature on online consumers' behaviours.

Revisiting perceived gratification, consumer attitudes and purchase impulses in cross-border e-commerce live streaming: a direct and indirect effects model

“…Moreover, in consumer browsing behavior, only utilitarian browsing is currently found to directly promote impulse purchases, while there is no significant association between hedonic browsing and impulse purchases. This result refutes some of the views of Park et al (2012), Hossain et al (2019), Kimiagari and Malafe (2021), Zhang et al (2018), Zheng et al (2019) and Li et al (2023). Currently, it is confirmed that consumers tend to browse purposefully in cross-border e-commerce live streaming and do not participate in live streaming purely for hedonic purposes.…”

“…Impulse buying behavior is immediate purchasing behavior resulting from exposure to stimuli, and emotional, hedonic, purposive and utility factors can all drive individuals to make unplanned purchases (Beatty and Ferrell, 1998;Park et al, 2012). Prior studies (Do et al, 2020;Gao et al, 2022;Karim et al, 2021;Li et al, 2023;Yan et al, 2023;Zafar et al, 2021) have adopted empirical investigations to assess consumers' immediate impulsive behaviors. But unlike an actual purchase, an impulse purchase is a sudden behavior that occurs before an actual purchase; it is an irresistible internal sense of impulse generated by the individual (Beatty and Ferrell, 1998) and triggered by multiple enticements on the Web (Akram et al, 2018;Chan et al, 2017;Redine et al, 2023;Karim et al, 2021;Kimiagari and Malafe, 2021;Verhagen and Van Dolen, 2011).…”

“…But unlike an actual purchase, an impulse purchase is a sudden behavior that occurs before an actual purchase; it is an irresistible internal sense of impulse generated by the individual (Beatty and Ferrell, 1998) and triggered by multiple enticements on the Web (Akram et al, 2018;Chan et al, 2017;Redine et al, 2023;Karim et al, 2021;Kimiagari and Malafe, 2021;Verhagen and Van Dolen, 2011). Recent research has highlighted that impulse buying has become a normalized consumer behavioral phenomenon in streaming media (Li et al, 2023;Yan et al, 2023), e-commerce (Christian et al, 2021) and social commerce (Zafar et al, 2021) scenarios. Zhang et al (2023) show that informativeness, social connections and live environments are significant prerequisites for creating positive consumer attitudes and subsequently transforming consumers from having no intention to buy to having a strong intention to buy.…”

“…Zhang et al (2023) show that informativeness, social connections and live environments are significant prerequisites for creating positive consumer attitudes and subsequently transforming consumers from having no intention to buy to having a strong intention to buy. Li et al (2023) state that consumers' attitudes toward live streaming determine which purchasing behavior they adopt, and that impulse buying is influenced by utilitarian and hedonic factors. In the context of cross-border e-commerce, Zhu et al (2020) showed that individuals' positive responses to streaming e-commerce significantly contributed to unplanned impulse purchases.…”

“…Hence, to fill the gap, a conceptual framework based on the use and gratification (U&G) perspective that combines the adoption factors, personal attitudes and behavioral consequences is proposed, which extends the U&G lens and captures the theoretical relationship between perceived gratification, consumer attitudes, browsing factors and impulsive purchases. The present work focuses on exploring the direct and indirect relationships between cross-border e-commerce live streaming demand factors, individual attitudes and behavioral decisions at the levels of perceived interactivity, perceived enjoyment, perceived emotional fulfillment and perceived information usefulness, which have been overlooked by previous studies (Bawack et al, 2023;Hossain et al, 2019;Gao et al, 2022;Kaur et al, 2020;Li et al, 2023;Menon, 2022;Santos Corrada et al, 2020;Xu et al, 2021;Zhu et al, 2020). Additionally, this work focuses on the mediating role of hedonic and utilitarian browsing between individual attitudes and impulse purchases in the context of cross-border e-commerce live streaming, an effects pathway that has also been neglected by previous work (Zhang et al, 2018;Zheng et al, 2019).…”