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With the development of information technology, live commerce is transforming the online shopping experience by providing a new model in which retailers, influencers, or celebrities sell goods via online video streaming (Guo et al., 2022; Zheng et al., 2023). Streamers can display products in real time, helping to reduce consumers’ uncertainty and to obtain more comprehensive information regarding products with less time and effort (Xu et al., 2020). Live commerce is now gaining widespread attention worldwide. Many e-commerce sites or social networking service platforms such as Amazon, Taobao, Instagram, and YouTube, have added “live streaming” features to their platforms (Chen et al., 2020). In 2020, Walmart started using TikTok to launch live commerce in the United States (Wang et al., 2022). A number of international brands, including Guess, Clarks, and Anna Sui, use live streaming to attract the younger generation to their brands (i.e., fashion shows) (Hu & Chaudhry, 2020). Chong et al. (2022) have pointed out that live commerce may be the future of e-commerce.
Compared with conventional text-to-image shopping, the advantages of live commerce are significant (Qian & Yang, 2020). First, live commerce is richer in regard to interaction, consumer immersion, and shopping experience, whereas conventional e-commerce platforms mainly use text and images to showcase goods (Cui et al., 2022). Second, live-streaming teams bargain with manufacturers or brands in advance so that the price appears cheaper in live-streaming, reducing consumers’ time of price comparison among different online retailers (Li & Ku, 2018). Third, the live-streaming team controls the products’ quality, saving consumers’ product selection time (Chen et al., 2022). Fourth, when explaining product features, streamers often bring their own knowledge and understanding of the products, prompting consumers to buy the goods, resulting in a higher conversion rate for live commerce (Chen et al., 2020). According to a recent report by McKinsey & Company, the conversion rate for live-streaming e-commerce is about 30%, which is 10 times higher than that of conventional e-commerce (Arora et al., 2021).
In China, live commerce has transformed the retail industry and established itself as a major sales channel in less than five years. Most e-commerce platforms and social networks in China offer live-streaming rooms where products can be sold (Chen et al., 2020; Lu & Chen, 2021). In the period between 2017 and 2020, the live commerce market in China experienced a compound annual growth rate of more than 280% (Arora et al., 2021). Moreover, the live commerce market surpassed 1.2 trillion yuan (US$195 billion) at the end of 2020, and it will exceed 4.9 trillion yuan (US$772 billion) by 2023 (Statista, 2021). According to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) report, 700 million Chinese Internet users have watched a live stream. Among them, 460 million have purchased goods via live stream, accounting for 45% of all Chinese netizens (CNNIC, 2022). Therefore, nearly half of the Internet users in China are using live streaming for shopping. In contrast, conventional e-commerce platforms are gradually losing their popularity. Consumers who shop only on conventional e-commerce platforms decreased from 71% in 2018 to 27% in 2021 (CNNIC, 2022). Therefore, excluding the newly added netizens, more than 100 million online consumers have switched from traditional e-commerce to live commerce. In a recent survey by Alix Partners, two-thirds of surveyed Chinese online consumers said they have bought products via livestream (Arora et al., 2021). Thus, it is crucial for researchers and online retailers to find out the reasons that online consumers’ shopping habits have shifted.