Lost in the narrative: How embedded content reduces sales on short video commerce platforms

Embedded content on short video commerce platforms, which integrates product-focused content with creators' self-focused content, has been widely adopted as a strategy to enhance viewer engagement and drive product sales. Despite its prevalent application, the effect of embedded content on product sales remains unclear. While self-focused content may reduce advertising avoidance, it risks distracting attention from the product, thereby making its effect on subsequent product sales unclear. To explore the sales effect of embedded content and its underlying mechanisms, we employ a mixed-methods approach, combining an observational study with a randomized experiment. Our empirical analysis reveals that a higher ratio of self-focused content decreases product sales. Heterogeneity analyses further uncover several measures to mitigate the negative impact: optimizing commercial embedment timing, increasing creator positive facial expressions, and enhancing product visual salience. Finally, we conduct a randomized experiment to validate the dual-path mechanism, which shows that self-focused content indeed reduces ad avoidance but also reduces ad attention, thereby affecting viewers’ purchase intentions through two opposing pathways. Our findings advance theoretical understanding of embedded content through a dual theoretical perspective and offer practical insights for practitioners on short video commerce platforms.