CONVERTING SHOPPERS’ IMPULSIVE BUYING TENDENCY IN LIVE STREAMING: INTEGRATING SIGNALLING THEORY WITH SOCIAL EXCHANGE THEORY
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Live streaming commerce is a novel form of an e-commerce platform, which works by establishing a temporary virtual community shared by streamers and customers in real time. With the popularity of live streaming shopping, many e-retailers adopted this new platform to promote their products in an effort to boost their sales volume. On the basis of signalling theory and social exchange theory (SET), this study proposes a research model to examine the informational signals and customer-streamer exchanges that two parties shared using live streaming platform. An online survey with 735 samples was collected through a professional online survey service platform (i.e., Wenjuanxing) to measure our model. Our results indicate that both service-centred signal (interaction quality) and product-centred signal (streamer credibility) have significant positive influences on customer evaluation of information quality. The results also denote that the received information quality acts as a significant predictor of customer engagement and buying tendency. Moreover, the results confirm the mediation role of customer engagement in predicting impulsive buying tendency, and the moderation effects of guanxi orientation on customer engagement and impulsive buying tendency. By synthesizing the preceding findings, theoretical and practical implications are discussed in the context of live streaming commerce.