Live Streaming Commerce: Uses and Gratifications Approach to Understanding Consumers’ Motivations

TLDR

The study introduces live streaming commerce, an e‑commerce model that combines real‑time social interaction through live streams. Using a uses‑and‑gratifications framework, the authors identified four motivations—enjoyment of interaction, substitutability of personal examination, need for community, and trend setting—and examined how these motivations relate to behavioral intentions in general watching, product search, and internet celebrity scenarios. Findings revealed that substitutability of personal examination predicted intentions in general watching and product search scenarios, enjoyment of interaction predicted intentions in the internet celebrity scenario, trend setting was associated with all scenarios, while need for community showed no significant effects.

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce live streaming commerce– e-commerce integrated with real-time social interaction via live streams. Using a uses and gratifications framework, we identified four motivations (enjoyment of interaction, substitutability of personal examination, need for community, and trend setting) related to live streaming commerce, and explored relationships between motivations and behavioral intentions in three different scenarios: general watching scenario, product search scenario, and internet celebrity scenario. Results showed that substitutability of personal examination was associated with the general watching scenario and product search scenario, while enjoyment of interaction was associated with the internet celebrity scenario. Trend setting was associated with all scenarios but need for community was insignificant with all scenarios. Design implications based on results are discussed for future live streaming commerce system development.