How IT Affordance Influences Engagement in Live Commerce: An Empirical Analysis Focusing on Social Cues as Moderating Effect

ABSTRACT

With the development of technology and media and the pursuit of non-face-to-face due to the corona pandemic, the influence of live commerce, a real-time streaming shopping channel, is growing. Starting from China, the popularity of live commerce is growing all over the world, and it has become an interesting topic among many practitioners and researchers. However, compared to its popularity, there are few studies on live commerce. Therefore, we build a theoretical model in terms of IT affordance such as visibility, guidance shopping, trading, and meta-voicing and investigate how live commerce affects engagement with customers. We empirically measure 428 individuals who have used live commerce using survey data. In addition, we conduct four types of scenario experiments on whether social cues on exposures of other consumers, influence customer engagement. Our results show that trading affordance has the most significant effect. This shows that the live commerce platform may want to devise a program that helps make payment easier for users who prefer a quick and simple process. Our study contributes to the literature by presenting the importance of IT affordance for live commerce. © 2022. All Rights Reserved.