Влияние совершения покупок в режиме реального времени на импульсивные покупки: перспектива модели S-O-R

1.1 Research motivation and research gap
Live commerce can be considered a revolutionary form of social commerce, focusing on increasing online product sales through real-time social interaction. We can find such a function in Amazon and Taobao e-commerce platforms – “Amazon Live” and “Taobao Live”‘. The one who plays a vital role in this real-time selling process is streamer. The products are presented in a more natural and consumer-friendly way in their live broadcast. At the same time, they will also carry out gamified interaction or provide some exclusive live offers to increase consumer stickiness and prompt consumers to place orders. Researchers propose that the main reason why live commerce has gained such rapid spread and wide consumer acceptance is that it overcame the asynchronous downside of traditional online product sales. Consumers can interact with anchors in real-time through chat boxes. At the same time, streamers can share links to products in their live streams anytime and anywhere. (Chen et al., 2020).
In recent years, more and more social commerce sites or e-commerce sites have added “live shopping” features, wanting a piece of cake in this new market. Some of the better ones doing this feature so far are Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, and Taobao.com. A report of Market Research Future estimated that the global livestreaming market would up to USD 247,275 million by 2027, growing continually at 28.1% compound annual growth rate throughout the prediction period. Live streaming has actually gone through a relatively long development phase before 2020. It can be said that the lockdown caused by COVID-19 gave the live e-commerce industry a chance to grow and change, as well as the live e-commerce industry, which has been building up its strength for a long time. Due to the epidemic, The scope of people’s daily activities has been greatly reduced, and links to the outside world are lessened by staying at home. Live streaming can be taken consider as a source of valuable content and an essential tool for communicating with the outside world in real-time. More and more people unfamiliar with the live streaming format started to learn and use it during the epidemic – the DAUs and hours of use on the relevant platforms were much higher than in 2019. Taobao Live, for example, attracted 113 million viewers in its top 20 streams in January and grew 2.2 times to 360 million by March. More and more practitioners and researchers are beginning to focus on the live shopping market, which has excellent potential. However, studies on livestreaming commerce are still in a small number (Cai and Wohn 2019). So there is no standard definition of the term “livestreaming commerce” in academia till now. But we can extract some familiar elements from the descriptions of previous authors to summarize the concept of live streaming commerce. livestreaming commerce was defined by Cai et al. (2018) as e-commerce that embedded real-time human-to-human interaction through live streams. Liu (2020) assumes that livestreaming commerce is essentially an extension and upgrade of TV shopping in the traditional media era, which is internalized on top of the traditional media production, reflecting the real-time characteristics and interactivity of communication in the new media era.
On the one hand, compared with traditional TV shopping, livestreaming commerce has more prominent advantages in presenting product details. Real-time, comprehensive product displays can effectively eliminate consumers’ concerns about product quality issues during online shopping. On the other hand, livestreaming commerce also inherits the traditional TV shopping fine content production. To present the complete details of the products in front of the audience requires a professional production team and streamers to complete them together.
Since streaming media provides mostly short and fragmented product information, this type of product information comes with attributes that can shorten consumers’ decision paths. In addition, Chen et al.(2019) suggested that marketing stimuli, such as issuing coupons, cash vouchers during live streaming, can also cause consumers to make impulse purchases with high probability (Chen et al., 2019).
The live commerce industry currently consists of three primary forms of live streaming (Wongkitrungrueng, Dehouche, and Assarut, 2020).
The first type is live streaming features embedded in shopping websites (e.g., Amazon, Taobao) and shopping mobile apps (e.g., Shopshops).
The second type is defined by Sun et al.(2018), which is originally a social platform that introduces live streaming as a commercialization model outside of its ad casting commercialization format. Merchants can open stores directly on social platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram.
The third type of platform is the one initially started as a live service and accumulated a large number of loyal service user monkeys and started to integrate product sales, which can be virtual or physical products. Twitch, for example, turned out to be a live gaming platform, and streamers mainly rely on fan bounties or taking ads to make money. However, after the platform introduced live shopping, streamers could post links to e-commerce websites while broadcasting to encourage viewers to buy (Cai et al., 2018).
Our focus is on the first type of livestreaming commerce where sellers or streamers own the excellent source of products to sell, and the viewers can directly purchase during the livestreaming shopping process without clicking into any extra links (outside the livestreaming shopping environment) in order to buy anything. And we defined livestreaming commerce in our paper as a marketing approach launched by e-commerce platforms, on which live streaming is adopted on PC or mobile terminals to facilitate brand promotion or product sales for e-commerce merchants. The necessary attributes include marketing as the purpose, live broadcast as the method, online (excluding the traditional live TV), time limitation, and high interactivity. It is believed that the article can enrich and add to the definition part of livestreaming.
Research in live commerce industry
Most researchers have studied the area focusing on customer’s motivation to viewing and purchase behavior (most about rational purchase behavior), also try to explain the reason of these behaviors occurring by adopting user perception (perceived value, perceived risk, perceived usefulness, perceived enjoyment), flow theory, IT affordance theory (Cai et al., 2018; Sun et al., 2019). Researchers have tried to determine the reasons behind the rise of live e-commerce as a new feature that brings enormous traffic to platforms and huge sales to products by studying consumers’ behavioral responses. However, few studies consider live shopping as an impulsive environment and further explore the elements affecting impulse buying behavior in the live shopping process. Verhagen and Dolen (2011) found that 40% of most people’s online spending can be attributed to impulse purchases. On a traditional shopping website, sensory attributes and product attributes may positively influence consumer online impulse buying behavior (Park et al., 2012). Better than traditional web shopping, the new live streaming function embedded in e-commerce platforms brought consumer a new type of shopping experience, which provided real-time interaction between consumer and streamer, visualization of time, and product quantity limits during live streaming relist in more substantial stimulus to impulse buying than ever before. So our study can make the following contribution:
From a theoretical perspective, this paper consolidates the theoretical foundation of the online impulse purchase field. Previous studies have primarily focused on technology effects, consumers’ credibility of static product information, quality of the website (Kim et al., 2011; Wu et al., 2013; Chen & Yao, 2018). There is less research on real-time interaction and marketing stimuli in a live shopping context. This paper extracted the unique streamer characteristics in e-commerce live streaming – interaction and marketing-related characteristics in live e-commerce – price discount, scarcity – by studying impulse purchase behavior in e-commerce live streaming context. This paper enriches the research theory of online impulse buying behavior and broadens the influencing factors of online impulse buying behavior in specific contexts. In addition to this, this paper also diversified the theoretical basis of impulse purchase behavior research in live e-commerce research. While previous studies on live e-commerce have focused on viewing motivation, purchase intention, and user perception, this study focuses on impulse buying behavior in live e-commerce. Based on environmental psychology theory (S-O-R Model), this paper investigates the mediating role of positive emotions in the relationship between interactivity, marketing stimuli, and impulse purchase desire. This study explains the whole process of impulse buying behavior formation in the live shopping environment from the antecedent variable to the mediating variable to the dependent variable.
From a practical perspective, the explosion of e-commerce live streaming brings new vitality to e-commerce. Live e-commerce can improve shopping efficiency and increase user stickiness. At the same time, online impulse buying behavior is an essential behavior in e-commerce, and it is a critical behavior to improve product sales and customer conversion rate. The study of impulse buying in the live e-commerce context can provide managerial suggestions for practitioners who wants to participate in or already in the live e-commerce industry. The study helped e-commerce platforms and merchants, and streamers understand consumer behavior more in-depth, gradually strengthening consumers’ impulse purchase intentions and prompting them to complete their impulse purchase behaviors. It is conducive for merchants to think differently and improve consumers’ shopping experience in consumption.
1.2 Research goal and questions
Online external environmental factors do change consumers’ emotional states, as has been proven by many researchers. (Xie, 2012; Hu, 2015). Emotional states that determine a vital status can either enhance the influence of the external environment on action or diminish that influence. (Yan, 2009; Fu et al., 2018; Wu, 2014). Here we regard interaction as an environmental factor in the livestreaming context. The real-time interaction between anchors and consumers in the live broadcast is a feature not available in the original static e-commerce website or TV shopping. Although few papers investigated the relationship between interaction and impulse buying behavior in the livestreaming context, we could find previous literature, which demonstrated that human interaction effectively promotes consumer impulse purchase impact (Rusman, 2010). Human interaction online and offline both belong to “face-to-face,” real-time interaction. In addition, various marketing stimuli with price or visual features are also important factors in triggering consumers’ impulse purchases during their online consumption. (Aggarwal et al., 2011; Parker & Lehmann, 2011; Graciola et al., 2018). Therefore, this study focuses on interactions and marketing stimuli and explores how they influence impulse purchase behavior. To investigate the influence of such external environmental factors. We use the classical stimulus-organization-response (S-O-R) model to put in the factors we have chosen. By applying the S-O-R model, we are well-positioned to abstract consumer responses to the consumer environment for use in answering the research questions we posed initially, allowing us better to understand the complex processes behind consumer responses and decisions. (Verhagen and Dolen, 2011; Parboteeah et al., 2009; Chen & Yao, 2018).
Research goal and objectives: the primary goal of the research is to identify factors that affect impulse buying behavior in live streaming shopping and their relationship. In order to achieve this goal, we formulated several objectives:
• To study the most recent and relevant research related to impulse buying behavior and the live e-commerce industry.
• To develop a structural research model of factors affecting impulse buying behavior in the live shopping environment.
• To collect primary data and test formulated model
• Develop recommendations for livestreaming e-commerce practitioners for better performance of each live broadcast.
Research questions: In this study, the following research questions were extended based on our research goal:
1. What is the process by which external stimulus (interaction, marketing stimuli) in a live shopping context influences consumer impulse buying behavior, and to what extent do they influence consumer impulse buying behavior?
2. What role does consumers’ emotional response have on the relationships between external stimuli and consumer impulse buying behavior?
This study is divided into four chapters:
The Chapter 1 introduced the development overview and basic characteristics of the study of live e-commerce, the characteristics and influencing factors of impulse buying behavior in the live e-commerce context, as well as described the purpose and significance of this study, generalized the research goal, objectives and questions. Also presented what are the innovative points of this paper compared with previous studies.
In Chapter 2, we focus on theoretical overview. This chapter first introduces the definition and measurement of online impulse buying, the framework of previous research on online impulse buying behavior, and the influencing factors. Then a literature review is conducted on the emotion theory involved in this paper. Finally, based on the literature, 10 hypotheses of this paper are proposed and the theoretical model of this paper is constructed.
The Chapter 3 discussed the methodology of this study. The chapter refers to the existing research scales related to online impulse buying behavior, live e-commerce, and measures the five variables in this paper using the Likert seven-point scale. Finally, we decided on the selection of the sample, the channel of questionnaire distribution and the method of data used to analyze the questionnaire.
Chapter 4 – Data Analysis and results. Data analysis was performed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) and Analysis of Moment Structures (AMOS) software, including descriptive statistics, unidimensionality (screening of construct items), reliability & validity analysis, model fit test, path coefficient test, and mediating effect test. Conclusions were drawn based on the data analysis results. Practical implications for e-commerce practitioners were proposed, and the shortcomings of this study and future research outlook on impulse buying behavior in live e-commerce were summarized.