The influence mechanism of quasi-site creativity stimulation on consumers’ impulse buying in e-commerce live streaming

The creativity of live streaming video can affect consumers’ value perception and emotion, thus stimulating their impulse buying. However, few studies consider the impact of video creativity combined with social presence on live streaming effect, and the difference in personal characteristics of consumers is also ignored. Therefore, based on the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) theory, this study constructs an influence mechanism model of live streaming consumers’ impulse buying under the stimulation of quasi-site creativity. In the proposed model, quasi-site creativity stimulation is composed of divergence and social presence, which can trigger consumers’ continuous viewing intention and impulse buying intention by arousing consumers’ sense of gain, i.e., perceived value and positive affect. At the same time, we also consider the moderating effect of personal characteristic, need for cognition (NFC), on the relationship between quasi-site creativity stimulation and sense of gain. Structural equation modeling was employed to analysis the research model of this study. The results show that divergence and social presence are the key stimulus factors of consumers’ continuous viewing intention and impulse buying intention, which can both arouse consumers’ intermediate reaction of perceived value and positive affect. Furthermore, consumer’s NFC plays a negative moderating role in the relationship between divergence or social presence and perceived value. Based on the findings of this study, it is suggested that live streaming managers improve the design of live streaming programs and provide strong quasi-site creativity stimulation to increase the viewing and transaction volume of live streaming, and design various quasi-site creativity live streaming programs for consumers with different NFC levels, so as to develop a broader potential market.