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Wang, Zining

University of British Columbia

This research investigates the sales impact of live streaming. We estimate the sales lift of live-streaming videos for a set of representative apparel brands using detailed sales and live-streaming records from a leading online marketplace. The empirical analysis reveals that live-streaming videos on e-commerce platforms have a positive sales impact on 81.44% of brands, no sales impact on 14.37% of brands, and a negative sales impact on the remaining 4.19%. Specifically, one extra live-streaming video to showcase a product leads to a median 22.9% increase in the product’s daily sales. Live-streaming channels owned by strong brands are more effective than those owned by weak brands. Additionally, the effectiveness of live-streaming videos varies across host types, with those hosted by brand-owned channels being the most effective, followed by star, and micro live-streamers. We further delve into the intricacies of live-shopping videos to explain the heterogeneous sales lifts among live-streamers. Specifically, we develop a deep-learning-based framework to extract multimodal features from 3,057 live product videos broadcasted by 111 live-streamers. We examine the sales impact of communication strategies employed by live-streamers while controlling for their nonverbal cues, including emotion display and vocal features. The results indicate that the usage of product sales pitches has a significant sales impact, such that on average, a 10% increase in the ratio of product-related content to CRM-related content leads to an 8.9% increase in live-streaming sales. Nonetheless, this sales lift of product sales pitches wanes as the follower counts of live-streamers decrease. In contrast, promotion sales pitches boost sales only if substantial discounts exist.

Text

2024-04-04

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/87679

Business Administration - Marketing and Behavioural Science

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/