Understanding Consumer Online Impulse Buying in Live Streaming E-Commerce: A Stimulus-Organism-Response Framework

With the proliferation of live streaming, there is evidence that online impulse buying is becoming an emerging phenomenon. Although many studies have investigated impulse buying in the context of offline shopping and business-to-consumer e-commerce, online impulse buying in live streaming has attracted little attention. In this study, we aim to explore the effect of social presence in live streaming on customer impulse buying based on the stimulus–organism–response framework. The research model presented here identifies pleasure and arousal as the mediation of impulse buying in live streaming. We use the AMOST and IBM SPSS PROCESS software to estimate our model based on data at the minute level from 189 customers, who watched live streaming in the past three months. The results suggest that the social presence of the broadcaster and the social presence of the live streamer positively affect impulse buying directly and indirectly via pleasure and arousal, promoting consumer online impulse buying in live streaming, but the social presence of the viewers has no significant effect on pleasure and arousal. For practice, our results can help policymakers and operators of the live streaming platform alleviate impulse buying in the digital world.