The role of scarcity promotion and cause-related events in impulse purchase in the agricultural product live stream

Harvest agricultural products are perishable. If they cannot be sold, there will be serious grain loss and food waste. It is an important issue related to human sustainable development and urgent to address. As the most popular way of shopping, live shopping has achieved remarkable achievements, while the existing research is relatively silent on how to promote the sales of agricultural products in the context of live streams. Based on S–O–R theory and dual-system theory, three studies investigated the intrinsic mechanism of consumers’ impulse purchase intention (IPI) in live streams. The results show that scarcity promotion (SP) and cause-related events (CRE) are positively correlated with consumers’ IPI through arousal and moral elevation. Interestingly, when SP and CRE are presented at the same time, the impact of CRE on IPI is no longer significant. Overall, the proposed model could be used to predict consumers’ willingness and provide the choice of marketing strategy to promote the sale of agricultural products, which has significant theoretical and practical value.