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Live streaming continues to progress rapidly. Its content forms have penetrated aspects like entertainment, shopping, education, and social contact. The combination of live streaming and e-commerce became a mainstream trend during the pandemic. The networks’ enthusiasm for live shopping comes directly from China, where live streaming is already a mature business for brands. According to Enberg (2021), live streaming sales in China reached US$131 billion in 2021, accounting for 37.4% of total social commerce sales. It is forecasted that, by 2023, 60.9% of social commerce dollars in China will come from live streaming, which will amount to US$281.21 billion. The number of daily active users on the TaoBao live streaming platform doubles each year. The same situation also applies to social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok. The data indicate that the traditional marketing methods of e-commerce can no longer meet consumers’ current shopping needs. E-commerce live streaming has, therefore, become the focus of merchants’ marketing strategies.
Impulse buying behavior is an essential topic in consumer behavior research, especially in e-commerce vs. traditional shopping. E-commerce is not limited by space and time; therefore, consumers can browse more product information, receive commodity stimulation, and are prone to impulsive buying behavior (Eroglu et al., 2001). This topic has been studied extensively in the field of traditional e-commerce, whereas less attention has focused on the field of live streaming e-commerce (Gong et al., 2020). Consumers on live streaming platforms tend to dawdle or “kill time,” which makes impulse-buying behavior occur more often than in other forms of e-commerce.
Some studies use social relations to discuss the participation willingness of e-commerce live streaming providers (e.g., Hu & Chaudhry, 2020). However, this approach ignores consumers’ perception of the attributes of e-commerce live streaming platforms. There is no doubt that social interaction, as the primary feature of live streaming, would encourage impulsive buying behavior (e.g., Hu & Chaudhry, 2020). Still, other factors are equally important. In this regard, most research on live streaming takes a technological or live streamer’s aspect to optimize user experience (Hu et al., 2017). Extant literature lacks a comprehensive framework to explain consumers’ impulsive buying behavior. To fill this gap, the present research focuses on the following questions:
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What factors promote consumers’ impulsive buying behavior in live streaming, especially in the dimension of user perception?
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What are the mechanisms of such promotion?
Factors like website design and product discounts stimulate consumers to purchase impulsively (Chan et al., 2017; Overby & Lee, 2006). These factors analyze the reasons for impulsive buying behavior from the perspective of website quality and consumer value. However, consumers’ immersive feelings in e-commerce live streaming is crucial to impulsive buying behavior. The immersive feeling, which is related to flow experience, was defined by Csikszentmihalyi (2008) as a particular state of mind. It means that an individual is fully engaged in an activity. Parboteeah et al. (2009) asserted that a consumer’s state of mind (cognitive and affective reactions) is aroused by various environmental cues that could influence the urge to buy impulsively. This provides valuable insight into how a consumer’s state of mind may mediate the effect between live streaming factors and impulsive buying behavior.
Studies have shown that flow experience can positively influence consumers’ brand recognition and purchase intention (Catalan et al., 2019). Regarding website design, flow experience can act as an intermediary to influence consumers’ purchase intention and willingness to revisit the website and online impulse buying (Hausman & Siekpe, 2009; Wu et al., 2016). In the context of social commerce, Chung et al. (2017) verified the positive influence of flow experience on impulse buying intention. Therefore, this study uses flow experience as a mediating variable to study the influencing factors of consumers’ impulse buying behavior in e-commerce live streaming.