Beyond sales: Seller explanation, product availability, and returns in livestream commerce

Livestream commerce combines seller explanation with continued product availability in a shopping cart. Our data separately record seller explanation duration and cart availability duration; these measures do not isolate informational content or establish actual consumer exposure. Sales alone may miss differences in the postpurchase outcomes associated with these durations. We therefore examine product returns as an indicator of postpurchase outcomes, estimating associations with streamer–product and broadcast fixed effects on a panel of nearly 190,000 livestream product listings. The two durations diverge sharply: longer explanation is associated with a lower return rate and longer cart availability with a higher one, even though both are associated with higher sales. The divergence widens with the scope for uncertainty about whether a product suits a particular buyer, while the price–discount pattern does not match the specific impulse-purchasing prediction examined here. The pattern is consistent with a buyer-screening interpretation, but the data do not observe purchasers’ exposure to explanation or distinguish screening from alternatives such as telepresence. Since only one of the two is scarce, the margin a seller controls is the allocation of the host’s attention rather than the length of a product's stay in the cart.