Understanding the real-time interaction between middle-aged consumers and online experts based on the COM-B model

This paper presents a study of middle-aged online consumers’ specific shopping behaviour on live streaming platforms and analyses the distinct marketing strategy provided by online experts. Influenced by unique social and cultural backgrounds, middle-aged online consumers lack related shopping experience and keep counterfeiting concerns to live streaming shopping, making them prefer to interact with online experts before making final decisions. Based on the COM-B Behaviour Changing theory and the Emotional attachment theory, the research model has been established in this study, and it divides influencing factors into the Emotion unit, Opportunity unit and Capability unit. To test the relationships between influencing factors and middle-aged online consumers’ interactive motivation, the partial least-squares path modelling and variance-based structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) have been applied on the SmartPLS. By analysing 450 samples, the study shows that the counterfeiting concern and ease of use factors positively impact online consumers’ motivation to interact with online experts, and self-efficacy plays a negative role.