Designing E-commerce Livestreams: How Product Presentation Duration Affects Sales?

Livestream e-commerce has emerged as a novel way to promote and sell products. This channel differs from existing promotion channels like TV/online video advertising because viewers voluntarily consume the content on this channel and are highly engaged due to social interactivity with the livestreamer and other viewers. A key design aspect of product promotions is the duration for which a product is presented during a livestream session. In this article, we empirically study the impact of product presentation duration by analyzing a unique dataset from two of the largest livestream shopping platforms in China. We find that when the product duration is longer, product revenue is higher. However, as the average presentation time increases, the session revenue decreases. The role of presentation duration in driving sales may differ between official (single-brand) livestreams sponsored by brands and third-party (multi-brand) livestreams. On analyzing the heterogeneous effects between official and third-party livestreams, we find that the positive impact on product-level sales is largely driven by third-party livestreams. On the other hand, both official and third-party livestreams can improve session-level sales by reducing the average product duration in a session. Thus, in the context of third-party livestreams, we observe a tension between the incentives of the brands (advertisers) whose goal is to drive an individual product’s sales and third-party livestreamers whose goal is to maximize total sales in a session. Our findings have useful implications for the design of e-commerce livestreams.