The dynamic effect of interactivity on customer engagement behavior through tie strength: Evidence from live streaming commerce platforms

Abstract

• Interactivity has a nonlinear (inverted U-shaped) relationship with customer engagement. • Tie strength plays a completely mediating role of interactivity and customer engagement. • The various of customer ratings and tenure of memberships moderate the interactivity–tie strength relationship. • A semantic keyword similarity method is applied to customer reviews. Interactivity, which is a key characteristic of the live streaming commerce environment, fosters users’ active attitudes and behaviors in communications and transactions. However, the literature on live streaming commerce, is scarce, and few studies examine how interactivity influences customers’ non-transactional behaviors from a dynamic perspective. In this setting, based on the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) framework, we developed a research model using real-time data to investigate the dynamic effect of interactivity on customer engagement behavior through tie strength in live streaming commerce, which is a relatively new derivative of social commerce. This study developed a text mining method to quantify constructs using a large-scale sample of 3,500,445 online review texts. Our empirical study found that interactivity has a curvilinear relationship with customer engagement behavior. Besides, tie strength plays an intermediary role between interactivity and customer engagement behavior. It was further observed that both tenure of membership and popularity have an important moderating relationship between interactivity and tie strength. The study enriches the relationship marketing theory and live streaming commerce literature. Moreover, this study is one of the first studies to use real-time online data for live streaming commerce research.