Influence of Streamer's Social Capital on Purchase Intention in Live Streaming E-Commerce.

Ping Xu,Bang-Jun Cui,Bei Lyu

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.748172

Ping Xu, Bang-Jun Cui + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.748172

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Abstract

The virtual display of products in e-commerce brings new problems of information asymmetry, and the overload of digital information also increases the difficulty of consumers' purchasing decisions. The real-time interaction between the streamer and the consumer during live streaming e-commerce will promote consumers' understanding of the product, reduce information asymmetry, and increase consumers' purchase intention. However, why do people trust the untouchable and unfamiliar streamers from live streaming e-commerce to purchase online? To understand this phenomenon, based on the perspective of the information asymmetry theory and parasocial relationship theory, this research identified how social capital affected purchase intention in live streaming e-commerce. Through a questionnaire survey of live viewers, the purchase intention model constructed by empirical testing was used. The findings showed that the streamer's professionalism, the reciprocal expectation of live streaming, and the viewer's parasocial relationship could effectively increase the viewer's purchase intention. The occurrence of a streamer's negative public events could significantly reduce the viewer's purchase intention. The scale of live streaming and the streamer's commitment had no significant impact on the viewer's purchase intention. Trust played an intermediary role between the streamer's professionalism and parasocial relationship and the viewer's purchase intention.

Highlights

The emergence of e-commerce has changed the way of exchanging traditional transaction information, fundamentally breaking the limitation of time and space, and providing traders with a powerful information search function
Social Capital on Purchase Intention e-commerce commodity transaction process, it is necessary to solve the problem of the inability to transmit the actual product information caused by online sales, product quality information display fraud, and information overload, which prevents the bounded rational buyers from making deterministic judgments, which are different from the information asymmetry problem of traditional markets (Jones and Leonard, 2014)
Both the centrality of the streamer and the parasocial relationship of the viewer to the streamer can affect the scale of live streaming e-commerce, but the findings showed that the parasocial relationship of the viewer to the streamer significantly positively affects the viewer’s purchase intention

Summary

Introduction

The emergence of e-commerce has changed the way of exchanging traditional transaction information, fundamentally breaking the limitation of time and space, and providing traders with a powerful information search function. Based on the Social Capital on Purchase Intention e-commerce commodity transaction process, it is necessary to solve the problem of the inability to transmit the actual product information caused by online sales, product quality information display fraud, and information overload, which prevents the bounded rational buyers from making deterministic judgments, which are different from the information asymmetry problem of traditional markets (Jones and Leonard, 2014). Live streaming ecommerce reduces consumers’ transaction decision time through the “signaling” method of the streamer’s narration of the product to a certain extent, solves the problem of the product quality perception and information overload, and effectively reduces information asymmetry between buyers and sellers (Wang et al, 2021)

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