Impulse buying in live streaming e-commerce: A systematic literature review and future research agenda

Abstract

Live streaming e-commerce is gaining increasing popularity and is widely believed to stimulate impulse purchases. However, the literature on this topic is fragmented, lacking a cohesive foundation that hampers theoretical and empirical advancement. To address this gap, this paper presents a systematic literature review on impulse buying behavior in the context of live streaming e-commerce. Only peer-reviewed articles published in journals indexed in Web of Science or Scopus were considered. Our review synthesizes relevant findings from prior research across publication outlets, methodologies, theoretical frameworks, research contexts, and analyzed factors. We adopt the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) model as an organizing framework, highlighting the key factors influencing impulse buying in live streaming e-commerce. The findings indicate that most research has relied on a cross-sectional survey design, predominantly conducted in Chinese contexts. Many researchers have employed the S-O-R framework; however, various other theoretical approaches have also been considered, depending on the key element under study (e.g., viewer, streamer, platform, or content of live streaming). Additionally, our findings identify a range of antecedents analyzed as different types of stimuli (e.g., marketing, streamer, live streaming, and others) and organismic factors (cognitive, affective, cognitive-affective, and personal traits). Finally, we propose a research agenda to guide future work and advance the field.