Influence of host's selling strategy on customers' future product return intention in livestreaming commerce

Abstract

The practice of shopping through livestream sessions has grown in popularity as a strategy to boost sales and build a client base since it allows brands to communicate directly with customers in the context of e-commerce. This study's main goal is to investigate the relationship between live-stream hosts' sales tactics and viewers' possible intents to return. The present investigation has employed the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) model to examine the likelihood that consumers will want to return merchandise following the completion of a live-streamed sales transaction. The quantitative analysis tool for evaluating empirical research has been the Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) method. The results underscore the mediating role of impulsive buying tendencies in the relationship between the transactional selling approach and product dissonance. Sales strategies that emphasize price and promotion, thereby creating pressure on viewers, can enhance impulsive buying behaviour. This, in turn, may engender negative cognitive dissonance in buyers, which indirectly stimulating the propensity to return product. Moreover, the study reveals that sale approaches which offer extensive information to viewers and endeavoring to establish relationships with each viewer, positively impact the construction of trust and minimization of the viewers' perceived risks. However, the study fails to establish a connection between product dissonance created by impulsive buying and the future return intentions of buyers in a live-streaming context. This necessitates further exploration of bringing other potential variables, such as return policies or delivery policies into the research in the future. We empirically evaluated the model by the survey of 242 responses, focusing on customer behaviour during the post-purchase phase in a live-streaming context, and this model was validated in regard to Vietnam. The results of this investigation provide substantial recommendations for practitioners.