SOCIAL COMMERCE AND LIVE-STREAM SHOPPING: DRIVERS OF IMPULSIVE PURCHASE BEHAVIOR

Abstract

Purpose: This research aims to identify the cues associated with live-streaming that significantly influence urban Indian consumers to make impulse purchases, and to explore response mechanisms in the form of internal states that may govern the relationships between live-streaming cues and impulse buying behavior. We plan to build a stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) model to predict consumer impulse buying in a live-streaming shopping context.

Design/Methodology/Approach: Data were collected from 387 urban Indian consumers who had watched at least one live-stream shopping session in the three months preceding the survey. A seven-point Likert-scale questionnaire was distributed to user communities on Instagram Live, Flipkart Live, and Meesho Live via Google Forms. PLS-SEM was estimated using SmartPLS 4.0. Validity was assessed against AVE, CR, and HTMT thresholds. Mediation was tested with flow state and perceived enjoyment as parallel mediators, using 5,000 bootstrap subsamples.

Findings: The model explains 54% of the variance in impulsive purchase behavior (R² = 0.54). Streamer interactivity and scarcity cues are the strongest direct stimuli (β = 0.31 and 0.26, respectively). Flow state mediates the interactivity-to-impulse path more strongly than perceived enjoyment (VAF = 43.2% versus 22.6–36.8%), with bootstrapped confidence intervals excluding zero for both mediators. Emotional arousal did not reach significance as a direct predictor (β = 0.11, p = .093).

Research Limitations/Implications: The cross-sectional design cannot establish causality. The sample covers Tier-1 cities only. Platform managers at Flipkart Live and Meesho Live can use these findings to prioritize the design of interactive features and scarcity cues for session-level conversion. Brand managers should favor content formats that induce absorption over informational formats that activate deliberate evaluation.

Originality/Value: Most live-stream commerce studies rely on data from Chinese platforms. This paper tests the S-O-R model on Indian platforms, with flow state and perceived enjoyment tested simultaneously as organism mediators, a design gap identified in Xu et al. (2020) and Chen et al. (2022).