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With the accelerated pace of life, consumers constantly use their spare time to receive real-time information through mobile devices (Wang, 2020). Simultaneously, the online social applications of texts and pictures cannot meet consumers’ needs for pastime, visual enjoyment, and personalized pursuit. Under such circumstances, the mobile short video industry, for example, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, is booming. In 2020, one in four U.S. Internet users spent an average of 33 minutes daily on TikTok (Perrin, 2021). Currently, mobile short video applications (MSAs) are expanding their role in social commerce (s-commerce). China has taken the lead in the short video industry that integrates e-commerce functions. According to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC, 2021), there were 873.4 million (88.3% of the country’s Internet users) short-form video platform users in China by the end of 2020. This leads to approximately 72 billion dollars’ gross merchandise volume (GMV) (Cheung, 2021). Given the importance of MSAs in mobile commerce (m-commerce) and s-commerce, researchers and practitioners must understand the driving force of consumers’ buying behavior on MSAs.
MSAs show two characteristics: s-commerce and media entertainment. From the perspective of s-commerce, more than 40% of sales are attributed to impulse purchases on an image-sharing s-commerce platform, such as Pinterest (Xiang et al., 2016). This amount of impulse purchases may be even higher for short video sharing s-commerce such as DouYin. From the perspective of media entertainment, users adopt MSAs as a powerful tool to spread entertaining content due to the convenience of both time-saving purposes and personalized purposes (Wright, 2017). Rather than e-commerce platforms, most people use MSAs for social activities and entertainment. Thus, we believe that most transactions on MSAs are impulsive. Since MSAs are used on mobile devices, characteristics associated with m-commerce also play a crucial role in transactions, such as location awareness, context sensing, high interactivity, convenience, and push-delivery (Kourouthanassis & Giaglis, 2012). These mobile-related advantages promote impulse buying, as Lee et al. (2014) and Zheng et al. (2019) mentioned. Although extant studies have investigated the influencing factors of impulse buying in different e-commerce scenarios, the effects of such factors may differ in a new e-commerce model. However, little effort has been devoted to studying the factors and the mechanisms contributing to MSAs’ impulse buying. To fill this gap, the present study will focus on the following research questions: