Study On The Continuance Intention Of E-commerce Livestreaming Based On SOR Approach

With the development of technology and e-commerce,livestreaming shopping has become the mainstream on major e-commerce platforms,creating a new way of shopping that is liked by many customers.Compared to the traditional way of shopping on e-commerce platforms where customers just browse the product information themselves,livestreaming shopping has brought back the element that has been absent from online shopping for a long time:the sense of human.The three major characteristics of livestreaming is immediacy,interactivity and fun,allowing customers to relive the experience of off-line shopping.In the future,livestreaming shopping will continue to revolutionize the shopping experience of customers with the help of technology such as 5G,VR and AR.Therefore,it is very important that we understand the behaviour mechanism of consumers when they watch livestreaming shopping and provide advice for the platforms,the endorsers and the brand accordingly.The specific research problem of this dissertation is:why do people keep watching/purchasing through the livestreaming of a certain anchor?And what role does inertia play in the formation of this continuous intention?In the social environment of e-commerce livestreaming,how do these factors influence the two?To answer this question,we propose our model based on SOR theory:Customer engagement mechanism as "S",which we further categorize into product interactivity,communication immediacy and peer cues;social presence and perceived social capital as "O",as we want to focus on customer's experience as a social actor in e-commerce livestreaming;finally,inertia and continuous intention as R,and we further discuss inertia as a mediator(between O and continuous intention)in this mechanism.The results have shown that inertia is positively related to continuous intention,and social presence and perceived social capital have positive influence both on inertia and continuous intention,based on which we further prove that inertia serves as a mediator in this process.Also,we find that among the three engagement mechanisms,product interactivity and communication immediacy have a positive impact on social presence and perceived social capital,whereas peer cues have no significant influence on them.The main contribution of this research is two-fold.First,it adds to current limited literature of continuous intention study in e-commerce livestreaming and proves that inertia plays an important role in forming consumers'continuance intention,which means that consumers will not evaluate all the choices they have every time they choose,and sometimes they rely on their inertia to choose;second,the study further explores the behavioural mechanism of a consumer as a social actor in e-commerce livestreaming,and proves that the social environment and experience plays a vital role in their behavioural intention.