Exploring Factors Affecting Consumer’s Impulse Buying Behavior in Live-Streaming Shopping: An Interactive Research Based Upon SOR Model

The emergence of live-streaming commerce has fueled the phenomena of impulse buying. However, existing understanding of this phenomenon is relatively limited. In this study, we adopted the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) paradigm to create an influence mechanism of impulse buying behavior in live streaming shopping. We investigated the influence of social presence and sales promotion (stimuli) on impulse buying behavior (response) through flow experience (organism). In addition, we also examined time availability and money availability, two situational variables, as moderators of flow experience and impulse buying behavior. To explore the factors that contribute to consumers’ impulse buying behavior, an online survey ( n = 375) was done in China. The empirical findings indicate that social presence and sales promotion positively affect flow experience, subsequently triggering consumers’ impulse buying behavior in live streaming. The results also indicated the positive moderation of money availability and time availability. Theoretically, the findings contribute to live- streaming commerce literature and impulse-buying literature. The findings also provide insightful managerial implications for live-streaming merchants to better understand impulse buying behavior to develop an effective marketing strategy.