Consumers purchase intention in live-streaming e-commerce: A consumption value perspective and the role of streamer popularity

The rapid development of live-streaming e-commerce has driven billions of sales revenues and made customers’ purchase intention a life-and-death issue for sellers. This study examines the influencing factors of customers’ purchase intention from a value perspective by adopting and extending the Theory of Consumption Values (TCV). We also incorporated streamer popularity as a moderating variable to reveal its significant impact on live-streaming e-commerce. This study collected 457 valid online questionnaires from Chinese live-streaming e-commerce users. Our findings show that five of six consumption values, namely functional, social, emotional, conditional, and self-gratification value, are significant drivers of purchase intention. In addition, streamer popularity has strengthened the influence of functional, social, emotional, and self-gratification value on purchase intention. This study deepens the current understanding of live-streaming and customer value research by establishing and validating a comprehensive research model, and reveals the decisive role of multi-dimensional value and streamer popularity in live-streaming industry. The research findings could guide live-streaming merchants to increase sales by reallocating their resources to different consumption values and optimising their investment strategy in popular streamers.