Impacts of E-Commerce Anchor Attributes on Consumers’ Willingness to Buy Online: Research Based on the Grounded Theory

Abstract

With the booming development of e-commerce live broadcasting, e-commerce anchors, as the main body of this model, play an increasingly important role. However, due to the proliferation of e-commerce anchors in a short period of time, many problems have arisen, such as the uneven standard of the anchor broadcast, broadcast content homogenization and other serious phenomena. In the long run, it will not only cause aesthetic fatigue among consumers, resulting in a stereotypical impression of the group of e-commerce anchors, but also seriously affect consumers’ online shopping experience, ultimately reducing their desire to buy. The fundamental reason for this is that companies and businesses lack a clear understanding of the inherent attributes of e-commerce anchors. Which attributes can stimulate consumers’ emotions and change their perceptions, thus increasing their interest in the product and their willingness to buy it? Based on this, this study explores the mechanism of the influence of e-commerce anchor attributes on consumers’ online purchase willingness. In practical terms, exploring the attributes of e-commerce anchors can not only help them improve their ability to broadcast, but also guide them to better serve their customers and ultimately help e-commerce companies gain higher profits. From a theoretical point of view, research on e-commerce anchors focuses on the marketing strategy and future development direction of their e-commerce platforms, or simply classifies e-commerce anchors as netizens and opinion leaders, but does not treat them as the main research subject for in-depth exploration. Therefore, this study focuses on the role of e-commerce anchor attributes on consumers’ willingness to buy online, using the qualitative research method of the Grounded Theory and interviewing 68 users with some experience of watching live e-commerce broadcasting to obtain original records as text data. On the basis of interview materials, this paper re-discusses the relationship between e-commerce anchor attributes and consumers’ online purchase willingness, and finally defines 4 main categories, namely, e-commerce anchor attributes, consumers’ intrinsic state, consumers’ willingness to buy online and contextual factors, and the concept connotation of 10 subcategories, such as charisma attributes, recommendation attributes, display attributes, interaction attributes, excitement, value, trust, consumers’ intention to order online, physical context and environmental context, which add new content to the relationship between e-commerce anchor attributes and consumers’ willingness to buy online, and provide a new research perspective. At the same time, an action mechanism model of the influence of e-commerce anchor attributes on consumers’ online purchase willingness is constructed. The results show that, in the context of live e-commerce shopping, e-commerce anchor attributes influence consumers’ intrinsic state and their willingness to buy online; consumers’ intrinsic state influences their willingness to buy online; meanwhile, consumers’ intrinsic state plays a mediating role in the influence of e-commerce anchor attributes on consumers’ willingness to buy online; contextual factors play a moderating role in the influence of e-commerce anchor attributes on consumers’ willingness to buy online. Finally, due to the limited research space in this paper, we will develop a scale for the influence of e-commerce anchor attributes on consumers’ willingness to purchase online in our follow-up research, and conduct empirical tests based on large data samples to improve the research results.