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Despite the disruption of the global trade environment, cross-border e-commerce has become an important driver of global trade. Through cross-border e-commerce platforms such as Amazon and Alibaba’s Tmall Global, consumers can easily access an increasing variety of worldwide goods at lower costs and in less time (Giuffrida et al., 2017). According to recent PPRO research, the value of worldwide cross-border e-commerce reached $412 billion at the end of 2018, which still leaves substantial room for further expansion (PPRO 2019). The growth of cross-border e-commerce has provided promising prospects for cross-border e-commerce platforms to build business strategies.
Although cross-border e-commerce platforms provide significant convenience and low costs for consumers all over the world, how to motivate and attract consumers is still a worldwide challenge. According to IPC (2019), online platforms in the USA attracted 26% of Chinese consumers to make the last cross-border purchase in 2017; the rate in 2018 was down to 14%, but it fortunately grew again in 2019. In China, a number of cross-border e-commerce platforms have failed due the inability to secure a loyal customer base (Mou et al., 2019a). In some European countries, the repurchase rate of cross-border e-commerce platforms is only 10.8% (Kim et al. 2017). There are still barriers that deter consumers from taking full advantage of cross-border e-commerce. For instance, a lack of familiarity and trust in the seller, crossing language barriers to access product information, and cross-border transactional risk (e.g., confiscation or delivery risk) raise uncertainty for consumers (e.g., Bin et al., 2003; Valarezo et al., 2018). These barriers are forcing platforms to seek more creative and flexible means to attract and satisfy consumers compared with traditional domestic e-commerce.
Many cross-border e-commerce platforms have responded to the challenges by embracing innovative tools such as live streaming. Live streaming in cross-border e-commerce platforms enables real-time online broadcasts for seller-consumer communication. Live streaming allows streamers (sellers) to present detailed and rich goods information (e.g., the produce or procurement process, direction for use) and communicate with potential consumers in real time (Hu et al., 2017). Correspondingly, consumers can obtain abundant information, prompt response (through the bullet screen), and even personalized services. Considering these benefits, live streaming is believed to have tremendous impacts on consumers’ online purchase behaviors, especially in the cross-border e-commerce context (Chen et al., 2017). Alibaba’s Tmall Global claimed that, at the end of the third quarter in 2019, their gross merchandise value generated through live streaming reached RMB 470 million, up from RMB 62 million a year ago (Wang, 2019).
However, there has been a limited understanding of the unique nature of live streaming and its empirical influence in the cross-border e-commerce context. On the one hand, the existing literature on live streaming purchases primarily focuses on users’ participation in live streaming and mainly investigates why users engage in live streaming (e.g., Ho & Yang, 2015; Lu et al., 2018; Cai & Wohn, 2019). On the other hand, some early evidence shows that consumers’ live streaming engagement is highly related to their purchase behaviors in domestic e-commerce (Sun et al., 2019; Wongkitrungrueng & Assarut, 2018), but few of them study the underlying mechanism between live streaming and consumers’ purchase behavior. It is still unclear whether and how live streaming impacts consumers’ purchase intention in cross-border e-commerce platforms. Therefore, it is quite meaningful to investigate how consumers’ cross-border online purchase intention can be affected by live streaming.