When peripheral route meets central route: An elaboration likelihood model of sales performance in live commerce

Live commerce allows streamers as sellers to show their products in vivid ways and interact with consumers in real time. However, few studies have investigated how peripheral social cues from both streamers and viewers interfere with the central information of products and impact live commerce sales. Based on the elaboration likelihood model, our study examines how central route factors relating to products (i.e., products' live demonstration, products' web information, products' brand popularity, and products' price discount) and peripheral route factors relating to streamers as well as viewers (i.e., streamers' social capital and viewers' engagement) affect sales performance in live commerce. We collect data from the largest Chinese live commerce platform - Taobao Live platform. We adopt econometric methods to analyze the obtained data of 34,925 product sales records of 373 live shows. Our results indicate that product information as the central route and streamers' social capital and viewers' engagement as the peripheral route respectively contribute to live commerce sales performance. In addition, we discover that peripheral route factors interact with central route factors. Specifically, streamers' social capital strengthens the positive impact of live demonstration on live sales but attenuates the influence of web information on live sales; viewers’ engagement also reinforces the positive effect of brand popularity on live sales. Our research provides insights into how the three core elements of products, streamers, and viewers individually and jointly affect live commerce sales, and enrich the elaboration likelihood model in the live commerce setting. Our findings also offer managerial implications for platform managers and streamers.